The fourth and sixth movements are slow. In both there is some thickness of scoring, a sinking too deep into the lower registers. Both are about the same length and both are constructed on the same plan; consisting of an incompleted, or broken, melody of the most intimately expressive character, a few measures of recitative, the melodious phrases again--in the one wandering down alone into the bass, disappearing rather than ending, in the other not completing itself, but developing into a contrasting section. In both there are these contrasting sections of more articulate and more animated music; and in both there is a return of the opening melody. There is wonderful music in these two short movements; but it is mysterious, fragmentary and incomplete, visionary, as it were, and without definite line. The remaining movements escape language. The fifth is full of changing moods; the seventh more than the others, consistent, this time in a vein of something like fury. The eighth and last is delicate and whimsical. The right hand keeps to a light, hopping figure most of the time; the left hand has little more than long single notes, which pursue a course of their own, without regular rhythm. There is a lack of titles, there is no motto, there is even no mark of Florestan and Eusebius. This most whimsical, most subjective, and, in many ways, most beautiful and most complicated of Schumann’s creations, stands before us, then, with no clue to its meaning except its title. This, as we have said, refers us to a half-crazy, fantastical musician. There is more in the music than lunacy, full of vagaries as it is. There is much poetry, a clearness and sanity in diction, inconsequential as the thought may be, a mastery of the science of music. Yet it is not surprising if some, bearing in mind the preternatural activity of Schumann’s imagination even in early manhood, and the breaking-down of his mind toward the end of his life, will hear in this music a note of something more tragic than whimsical fancies, will feel that Schumann has strayed perilously far afield from the world of orderly nature and warm blood. A few short pieces that Schumann published, like the _Novelletten_, are not held together in a cycle. In these the humor is prevailingly happy and active, the workmanship clear, and the form well-balanced. Fine as they are, in listening to them separately one misses something of Schumann. The man was a dreamer. He sank himself deep into moods. He lived in complete worlds, created by his fancy. A single piece like one of the ‘Novelettes’ hardly initiates the listener into these wide domains. Fully to put ourselves in touch with Schumann we must wander with him, and in the course of our wandering, drift farther and farther into his land of phantoms.