The progress of German pianoforte music is consistent and unbroken from the death of Schubert down to the end of the nineteenth century. All composers, both great and small, with the exception of a few who would have had music remain in the forms of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, even at the price of stagnation little better than death, submitted themselves and their art to the influences of the Romantic movement which had placed so distinct a mark on the music of Weber and Schubert. We meet with relatively few long works. The best of these are frankly called Fantasies, claiming little relation to the sonata. Hundreds of sets of short pieces make their appearance. Rarely have the separate pieces in a set any conventional or any structural relation. The set as a whole is given a name, simple and generic, or fantastical. We meet ‘Songs Without Words,’ ‘Fantasy Pieces,’ ‘Melodies for Piano,’ ‘Nocturnes,’ ‘Ballads,’ ‘Novelettes,’ ‘Romances,’ ‘Night Poems,’ ‘Love Dreams,’ ‘Rhapsodies,’ ‘Diaries,’ and ‘Sketch-books.’ There are Flower, Fruit, and Thorn pieces, Flying Leaves, Autumn Leaves, and Album Leaves, even the ‘Walks of a Lonely Man’ and _Nuits Blanches_. Most of these short pieces conform to one of three types. Either they are moods in music, in which case they have no distinctive features; or they are _genre_ pieces, a diluted, watery (usually watery) picture music; or, by reason of the constant employment of a definite technical figure, they are _études_ or studies. Most of them are mild and inoffensive. Few of them show marked originality, genuine fervor or intensity of feeling. They are evaporations rather than outpourings; and as such most of them have been blown from memory. A cry against this vigorous wind of Time, harsh and indiscriminating as in many cases it may appear to be, is hopeless. Not refinement of style nor careful workmanship can alone save music from the obliterating cyclone. One may as well face the fact that only a few men’s moods and reveries are of interest to the world, that sentimentality must ever dress in a new fashion to win fresh tears and sighs. I The sweetest singer of songs without words was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. He sang the sweetest stories ever told. He was thoroughly prosperous in his day; he was even more than that, he was admirable and worshipful. The whole of his life reads much like the accounts of Mozart’s early tours. He was the glass of fashion and the mold of form in music; not only in pianoforte music, but in orchestral and vocal music as well. One might continue the quotation, and remark how the observed of all observers is now quite, quite down; but one may never say that his music is out of tune and harsh. Its very mellifluousness is what has condemned it. It is all honey, without spice. For this reason it has become the fashion now to slight Mendelssohn, as it once was to revere him.