In pianoforte music, William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875) carried on the Mendelssohn tradition quite undefiled. Bennett was more than a pupil of Mendelssohn; he was a devoted and unqualified admirer. His own pianoforte works are numerous, but they have suffered something of the same malice of Fate that still preserves the ‘Songs without Words’ chiefly for fun. They include four concertos, and many short pieces, studies, diversions, impromptus. They have the merits of their prototypes, clear, faultless writing and melodiousness. A contemporary of Mendelssohn whose life led him finally to Petrograd, is still remembered by one or two of his studies. This is Adolf Henselt (b. 1814-89). Henselt’s work is really independent of Mendelssohn. His style was founded upon a close acquaintance with Weber’s. In 1836 he gave private recitals in Berlin and was especially prized for his playing of the Weber sonatas. Two sets of concert studies were published as opus 2; and in them is the still famous and delightful _Si oiseau j’étais_. Besides these he composed numbers of Rhapsodies, Ballades, and other short pieces in the romantic style; all of which together show distinctly more originality in the treatment of the piano than Mendelssohn showed. II Meanwhile Robert Schumann was composing sets of pieces which have been and long will be regarded as one of the most precious contributions of the Romantic movement to pianoforte literature. Schumann was an enthusiast and an innovator. He was a poet and a warm-hearted critic. He was the champion of the new and the fresh, of self-expression and noble sentiment. In his early manhood a strained finger resulted from over-enthusiastic and unwise efforts to make his hand limber, and cut short his career as a concert pianist, for which he had given up his study of the law, not without some opposition. He turned, therefore, with all fervor to composing music for the pianoforte, and before his long-delayed marriage with Clara Wieck, daughter of his teacher, had published the sets of pieces on which a great part of his fame now rests. Schumann was steeped in romantic literature, particularly in the works of Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann; and most of his works show the influence of these favorite writers upon him. One finds symbolical sequences of notes, acrostics in music, expressions of double and even triple personalities; but these things are of minor importance in his music. The music itself is remarkably warm and poetic, remarkably sincere and vigorous whatever the inspiration may have been. It is happily sufficiently beautiful in itself without explanation of the cryptograms which oftener than not lie underneath it.