The scenas and the ballads involve not a little of the declamatory style, which is quite unlyrical. Declamation in song is familiar to us in the recitatives of the older operas, but declamation in the true sense is more melodious than dry recitative. It is, in fact, genuine melody, with all elements of melodic beauty, except that it is independent of strict measure and rhythm, receiving all its accents from the words which it follows with greatest nicety. The possibilities of this style of music have only begun to be developed in the last two or three decades. In Schubert declamation is usually on the right track, but is pretty likely to be uninteresting. We must make an exception, however, of such masterly bits of declamation as the last line of ‘The Erl King,’ in which the half-spoken announcement, ‘Lo, in his arms the child was dead,’ closes the ballad abruptly and seems to frame it off from the workaday world; or the last line of ‘The Wanderer,’ in which Schubert’s poetic sense reinforced the emphatic word with an emphatic melodic note: _Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück_. But on the whole we must admit that the whole body of Schubert’s declamatory and dramatic songs is hardly worth the trouble of study, except for the purpose of enlarging one’s knowledge of the composer. If it were not for the wonderful ‘Erl King,’ greatest of ballads, people would doubtless be saying that Schubert was a lyric song-writer only, and had no feeling for the ballad form. IV Of Schubert’s six hundred songs, as we have said, many are of little or no musical value. Sometimes the melody seems too facile; it expresses nothing; it is like every other ordinary tune. And sometimes, especially in the longer ballads and scenas, there is a lack of any musical character; commonplace chords and scraps of indifferent melody succeed each other to fatigue. The length is sometimes enormous. ‘The Diver’ occupies nearly forty printed pages, and many others between fifteen and twenty.