The second of the ‘Fantasy Pieces,’ _Aufschwung_, calls imperiously upon the great resources of the pianoforte. There is power and breadth of style, passion and fancy at work. It is a wholly different and greater art than Mendelssohn’s. It is effective, it speaks, it proclaims with the voice of genius. And in the little _Warum?_ which follows it, skill is used for expression. There is perhaps more appreciation of the pianoforte in this piece, which by nature is not pianistic, than there is in all the ‘Songs without Words,’ an appreciation of the contrasting qualities of high and low sounds, of the entwining of two melodies, of the suggestive possibilities of harmony. Take them piece by piece, the _Grillen_ with its brusque rhythms, its syncopations, its rapidly changing moods; the _In der Nacht_, with its agitated accompaniment, its broken melodies, and the soaring melody of the middle section, not to mention the brief canonic passages which lead from this section back to the wild first mood; the delicate _Fabel_, the _Traumes Wirren_ with its fantastic, restless, vaporish figures and the strange, hushed, shadows of the middle section; and the _Ende vom Lied_, so full for the most part of good humor and at the end so soft and mysteriously sad; these are all visions, all prophecies, all treasure brought back from strange and distant beautiful lands in which a fervid imagination has been wandering. Into such a land as this Mendelssohn never ventured, never even glanced. For Schumann it was all but more real than the earth upon which he trod, such was the force of his imagination. The imagination is nowhere more finely used than in the short pieces called the _Kinderscenen_. Each of these pieces gives proof of Schumann’s power to become a part, as it were, of the essence of things, to make himself the thing he thought or even the thing he saw. They are not picture music, nor wholly program music. They are more a music of the imagination than of fact. Schumann has himself become a child in spirit and has expressed in music something of the unbound rapture of the child’s mind. So, even in a little piece like the ‘Rocking Horse,’ we have less the picture of the ‘galumphing’ wooden beast, than the ecstasy of the child astride it. In the _Curiose Geschichte_ there is less of a story than of the reaction of the child who hears it. In the _Bittendes Kind_ and the _Fürchtenmachen_ this quality of imagination shows itself with almost unparalleled intensity. The latter is not the agency of fear, it is the fear itself, suspense, breathless agitation. The former does not beg a piece of cake; it is the anguished mood of desire. Only in the last two pieces does Schumann dissociate himself from the moods which he has been expressing. The former, if it is not the picture of the child falling asleep, is the process itself; the latter is, as it were, the poet’s benediction, tender and heartfelt.