It must be more than a coincidence, then, that Schubert, the master song-writer, came at a time when music was bursting forth into romantic expression. Romantic song could not have been born much earlier. For music, as an instrument of emotional expression, did not come to maturity much earlier. Emotion we do find expressed in Haydn and Mozart certainly, but it is subordinate, restrained, and not very precise. It rarely seems to be the prime object of the music. The prime object seems rather to be the giving of pleasure through the beauty of musical patterns. The music must not be obviously inappropriate to the words of an aria, but it is not thought of as expressing their sense in itself. The movements of a Mozart symphony may have for us some mild emotional connotation; but in the composer’s mind, in all probability, it was not the emotion which germinated the music, but the music which germinated the emotion. The music of the long period before Schubert was predominantly formal. It became increasingly complex and refined. It greatly enlarged musical technique and the means of expression. From the emotional point of view the eighteenth century was _storing up_ the technical materials which the nineteenth was destined to _use up_. It was Beethoven who developed the expressive power of music to its grandest proportions. Never has emotion been shown more powerful, beauty more dignified, than in his symphonies. The art of music, as it passed from his hands into those of younger men, was a grand and universal instrument, equal to any emotional demand men might want to make upon it. But, if Beethoven had developed all these capacities in music, he had by no means used them all. Emotion in his music is that of the epic poet, broad and grand, rather than that of the lyricist, personal and subtle. He had developed his instrument to marvellous perfection. He had played upon it only a few of its tunes. The greatest of the classicists, he was the man who taught the romanticists their trade. He indicated how music could be used primarily for emotional expression. But the doing of it he necessarily left largely to those who came after. Among the first and the greatest of these was Schubert. He was born to sing. He loved a beautiful melody beyond anything else. In some ways he was like a woman, responding with infinite tenderness and delicacy to the impressions that came to him from without, divining shades of feeling which a man can rarely catch.