The ‘Five Poems,’ to words by Mathilde Wesendonck, are, with one exception, songs of the first rank. This exception is the ‘Sorrows,’ which is a bit pompous and rings insincere. ‘The Angel’ is a simple melody with a soft, flowing accompaniment much in the style of the ‘Lohengrin’ music. ‘Stand Still’ is a vigorous and dramatic song, combining both the lyrical and the declamatory elements. The two remaining songs will always be masterpieces of the first order. They are regarded as ‘studies’ for the Tristan music and both contain motives from ‘Tristan’ or harmonic peculiarities which mark them out unmistakably. _Träume_ (‘Dreams’), the better known of the two, weaves a wonderful sensuous spell about the listener. Its melody is constructed in a peculiar manner which we sometimes meet in Brahms--a sort of telescoping of successive phrases, so as to bind the parts more cogently and increase the emphasis of the whole. The harmony is a wonderful series of melting chords, culminating in ecstatic chromatic modulations on the words: ‘Sanft an deiner Brust verglühen Und dann sinken in die Gruft.’ The other ‘Tristan’ song is _Im Treibhaus_ (‘In the Hothouse’). It contains two of the ‘Tristan’ motives, slightly altered, those of the wounded Tristan and Tristan’s longing. The harmony in this song is exceedingly delicate and chromatic--revolutionary for its time. Here the chromatic development toward which composers had half consciously striven for two centuries at last attained a complete development. The lyric must rank as one of the wonders of modern song literature. Liszt’s songs also we may roughly divide into two classes--those of the Paris period and those of the Weimar period. More than Wagner, Liszt wrote his French songs in the taste of the time and the nation. As one of the pets of the capital he was sure to be heard gladly by the Parisians and his wonderful instinct for pleasing made him write naturally in a style which we cannot usually differentiate from the style of native song writers. _Comment!_ for instance, is as French a song as though its composer had never travelled beyond the Parisian fortifications. Its sensitive feeling for the words, its delicate use of the accompaniment in the thin French style, mark it as utterly un-German. The most striking of the Parisian songs is _Enfant, so j’étais roi_, to words by Victor Hugo. It is elaborate and pretentious, but it has a good deal of real power. On the whole, however, Liszt’s French songs are without the very qualities which make the later German songs so valuable--chiefly the dramatic and the declamatory values.