The _Carnaval_, likewise a scene at a fair, representations in music of various people, sights, and sounds, is built on three series of notes which Schumann called ‘Sphinxes’ and which he had published with the music. It is very doubtful whether the employment of these sequences in one form or another gives to the whole series an organic interdependence. Only with care can the student himself trace them, in such varied guises do they appear; and to be left in entire ignorance of them would hardly interfere in the least with an emotional appreciation of the music. The return at the end of some of the movements and passages heard at the beginning, however, rounds off the work and makes an impression of proportions. Moreover, within the work many of the pieces lead without pause into the next, or are without an end at all, like the _Florestan_, which is left fulminating in the air. In the _Davidsbündler_ there is again the return at the end of familiar phrases, but the _Kreisleriana_ is like the _Faschingsschwank_ without structural unity. Yet perhaps none of the Schumann cycles is less friable than the _Kreisleriana_. It is long and it is varied; but here, perhaps more than in any other similar works of the composer, there is a continuous excellence of workmanship and intensity of expression. Besides these cycles there are sets of short pieces which are independent of each other. Such are the ‘Fantasy Pieces,’ the _Novelettes_, the ‘Romances,’ and the _Bunte Blätter_, among others. These may be fairly compared with the ‘Songs without Words’ of Mendelssohn. How utterly different they prove to be, how virile and how genuinely romantic! They are not only the work of a creative genius of the highest order, they show an ever venturesome spirit at work on the keyboard. Take, for example, the ‘Fantasy Pieces.’ The first, called _Des Abends_, is as properly a song as any of Mendelssohn’s short pieces which are so designated. The very melody is inspired and new, rising and falling in the long smooth phrases which are the gift of the great artist, not the mere music-maker. The accompaniment appears simple enough; but the wide spacing, the interlocking of the hands, above all, its rhythm, which is not the rhythm of the melody, these are all signs of fresh life in music. The interweaving of answering phrases of the melody in the accompaniment figures, the contrast of registers, the exquisite points of harmonic color which the accompaniment touches in the short coda, these are signs of the great artist. It is remarkable how little Mendelssohn’s skill prompted him to such beautiful involutions; how, master as he was of the technique of sound, he could amble for ever in the commonplace. And Schumann, with far less grasp of the science, could venture far, far beyond him.