Next, Schubert showed a marvellous sense of poetry in music. The music before him had been, as we have said, predominantly formal. With Beethoven it had reached its most perfect formal development and with the symphony and sonatas of Beethoven’s later years broke through formal bonds in its search after more intense expression. The violent conflict between form and expression is the glory (and to some minds the defect) of Beethoven’s later work. But Schubert in his songs seems to feel nothing of this struggle. It is as though he had been born on the other side; as though Beethoven had done the fighting for him. Or it is as though a mountain stream had struggled through rocks and over a precipice to reach the quiet level of the plains below. With Schubert we feel only joyous spontaneous expression of the words. The expressive resources of music which his forerunners had prepared are laid at his feet, and from them he chooses with wonderful acuteness the details and devices he needs. This sense of poetry could hardly be found in the songs of Reichardt and Zelter. Sung with the words their music would doubtless seem appropriate. But played without the words to point the meaning they would seem pleasing but colorless. On the other hand, if you play the songs of Schubert on the piano you will get, to a surprising degree, the feelings conveyed by the words. It is not too much to say that before Schubert song music was appropriate only; with Schubert song became _expressive_. Finally, Schubert gave to the art-song that freedom of form which has been a characteristic of it ever since. Not that he was the first to write the _durchkomponierte_ song or any of the other freer forms, but he was the first with the genius necessary to establish such forms (or formlessness) for all time. Schubert’s predecessors had not been pedants. Within their limited capacities some of them had been genuine poets of sentiment. But form had nevertheless retained its hold on the spirit of their song writing. The regular recurrence of measured lines, or the building up of the song according to a scheme of regular repetitions or alterations, had been to them a matter of second nature (except when a Hiller or a Zumsteeg tentatively broke through for experiment’s sake). Such a song as Schubert’s _Aufenthalt_ or the early ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,’ in which there is no discoverable scheme yet a most cogent unity, would have been hardly conceivable to these early pioneers. Schubert, then, with a marvellous fund of melody, a sense of poetic values in words and music, and a free instinct for expressive form, did for the song what Haydn had done for the symphony--put it on the musical map. He was able to do this not alone because he was a great musician, but because there were great poets in Germany whose lyrics he could set. Let us see who and of what character these poets were.