But perhaps the most masterful song of the cycle is the eighteenth, ‘Dead Flowers.’ This, in moderate two-four time, is strikingly like the allegretto movement of Schubert’s C major symphony, one of the loveliest of all his orchestral pieces. The entrancing modulation from an undecided minor to a spirited major on the words ‘_Der Mai ist gekommen, der Winter ist aus_,’ is a touch which any lover of Schubert would recognize as his unmistakably at the first hearing. But don’t miss the finer art of this lovely passage, for the joyousness of the major is deceptive; the miller is black at heart over his failure in love, and is only beguiling himself in a passing moment. Notice, therefore, the plaintiveness of the accompaniment on this passage. ‘The Miller and the Brook’ is an interesting example of the half lyrical, half declamatory style which Schubert sometimes adopts, as we have seen. But the last piece of the cycle is pure song. It is hard to analyze the plaintive character of this melody, and hard especially to understand how the augmented fourth, traditionally considered a harsh interval, becomes at Schubert’s hands an instrument of deep emotional expression. It has often been pointed out that the motive of the brook gives a subtle unity to this song cycle, and that the motive is preserved in Schubert’s music. From the rippling triplets of the accompaniment of ‘Whither,’ the first song in which the brook enters, to the cradling motion of the accompaniment to the last, the brook is almost continuously in the piano part. But, though Schubert’s feeling here is extremely delicate, his technical means are of the simplest. If it is realism, it is realism of the most primitive sort. We should not be misled by the praise of the ‘brook music’ in this cycle. True descriptive music, whether for good or for bad, did not enter song until after Schubert. And we should further remember that, although Schubert was indeed the first great composer of the song-cycle, he never gave the form the unity and inner meaning which was imparted to it by Schumann, and which is typical of it to our minds. The _Müllerlieder_ reveal admirably the tender interpretation of sentiment of which Schubert was such a master. But they are by no means songs of a greatness equal to that of his next cycle, the _Winterreise_. The ‘winter journey’ taken by the hero (Müller again is the poet) is a pilgrimage in search of forgetfulness after an unhappy love affair. Even more than the _Müllerlieder_, it is an essay in the interpretation of nature in terms of human sentiments. The songs, indeed, are little more than a series of parallels drawn between the scene of the winter landscape and the feelings of the hero. They are a personalizing of the weather, a dramatization of the thermometer.