He has left us three such works--the _Müllerlieder_, of twenty songs; the _Winterreise_, of twenty-four; and the _Schwanengesang_, of fourteen. The last was not planned by the composer as a cycle, but was issued as such by his publisher just after his death, when (as has so often been the case) the Germans had waked up partially to the genius they had lost. And for once the commercial publisher was justified. For the songs were actually Schubert’s swansong, being written in the last few weeks of his life (the final one of the series was the very last of his compositions). Moreover, they are of a pessimistic character which is rarely betrayed in Schubert’s earlier works. The _Müllerlieder_, or ‘Miller’s Songs,’ were composed by Schubert in his first enthusiasm over Wilhelm Müller’s poems. It is related that he went to call upon a friend one evening, found the friend out but discovered the book lying upon his table, became immersed in it while waiting, and finally walked away with it in his pocket. The next day he apologized for the borrowing, pleading that the poems had inspired some beautiful melodies, and he felt he had to write the music for them all. The friend forgave him, as have all who have since learned to know the songs he wrote to those words. The Miller Songs tell a connected story, after the manner of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ by making each one of the poems the lyrical expression of the hero in his successive moods. The hero of Müller’s cycle is a typical figure of the German romanticism. He is a wanderer on the face of the earth, a sensitive, introspective man, a friend of sorrow and in love with unhappiness. To us he seems a rather ridiculous figure. But he was taken seriously enough by the Germans of the time, who had good cause to be pessimistic over the disorganized state of their country and their national life. This miller hero is suffering from unrequited love, which was a favorite theme of the romanticists. But, above all, in the spirit of the time, he is a lover of nature. He sees in nature a reflection of his own moods and sorrows. Nature seems to us to be one of the staples of lyric poems--worn to the bone. But, as a matter of fact, nature is a rather recent invention of civilized man’s. The Alps were ‘discovered’ by the poets no earlier than the eighteenth century. Certain early poems, notably the Iliad, show a feeling for natural beauty. But the study of nature as a cult, the conscious effort to find moods and meanings in her, is hardly more than a century and a half old. Folk poetry contains very little of it, and then usually only in sentimental connotations. In Schubert’s time nature was still a recent discovery and a thrilling one. So Schubert’s contemporaries, apart from their pessimism, were able to immerse themselves in such poetry as that of the _Müllerlieder_ and the _Winterreise_ without feeling the strained preciosity which we inevitably feel in it in our realistic age.