Schubert, by force of genius, proved that the song could be as great intensively as an opera or oratorio could be extensively; that to write a perfect song was as difficult and worthy a task for a great artist as to write an oratorio. To prove this he showered all the riches of his artistic equipment on the song. First of all, he gave to it great melodies. The melodies of the best art-songs before his time could not be compared with the great melodies which musicians had put into symphonies and operas. Musicians had felt that songs were not worthy of their best melodies, but only of their second and third best. Schubert gave to song his very best. Next, Schubert chose (among his many texts) some of the greatest short poems in German literature. Musicians previously had generally considered the words a very unimportant part of vocal music. True, the music of the eighteenth century (especially in Germany) is full of exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions occur as if by accident and prove that composers either didn’t care or didn’t know which texts were better and which were worse. It is true, also, that Reichardt Zelter, and others set the poems of Goethe to music, but their settings were unpretentious and hardly aspired to be in themselves adequate to express Goethe’s thoughts. With Schubert, for the first time, we find the greatest poetry married to the greatest music. It must be admitted, also, that Schubert’s taste was not highly critical in the matter of poetry. Among his six hundred songs are a great many with insipid or pompous words. But some of these texts were written by Schubert’s personal friends (such as his room-mate Mayrhofer) and were set as a personal compliment. Further, Schubert, who worked daily, did not always find the best of poems at hand, and was obliged to take what he could get, though he probably knew which were better and which were worse. And, finally, he was generally best inspired by the best poems, which should be a proof of his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. At any rate, one finds the texts of Schubert’s songs almost an anthology of the best German lyrical poems written in the century before his death. And with some of the verses is music that seems to have been made by one and the same master artist to fit for all time. On the whole, though Schubert was not a man educated in _belles lettres_, he showed a vivid appreciation of poetic excellence which has been a mark of great song writers ever since.