In most of the pieces of the three last sets there is a touch of mysticism, often of asceticism. The style is transparent; the accompaniments, if one may speak of accompaniment in music that is so polyphonic, are lightly touched upon, barely sketched. They have no fixed line, but seem like flowing draperies about a figure in free, calm movement. Witness particularly the second piece in opus 117 and the sixth in opus 118. The latter is surely one of the most romantic of all Brahms’ pieces. Does it speak of some ancient ruin in the northern twilight? Is it some vision in a bleak, windswept place? Is not the opening phrase like the voice of the spirit of Time and Mortality? How the winds sweep it up, how it echoes and reëchoes through the night. And there comes a strain of martial music. The splendors that were rise like mist out of the ground. The shades of strong heroes pass by. Through the vision still rings the inexorable cry, till the spirits have vanished and the wind once more blows over a deserted place. It is all a strange, wailing invocation to the past. All are unusual music, all masterpieces. There is the utmost skill, as in the canonic figures in the first intermezzo of opus 117, in the middle section of opus 118, No. 2, and all through opus 118, No. 4. There is a legendary quality in both opus 117, No. 1, and opus 117, No. 3. In the latter the A major section is extraordinarily beautiful and without a parallel in music. The last set is perhaps as a whole the most remarkable. There are three intermezzos and one rhapsody. In many measures of the first intermezzo the harmonies seem to unfold from a single note, to be shed downward like light from a star. The music drifts to a melody full of human yearning, rises again in floating harmonies, drifts slowly downward, too heavy with sadness. In the second and third the mood is happier, cool in the second, smiling in the third. The final rhapsody is without a trace of sentiment, healthy, sane, and enormously vigorous. Something stands in the way of its effectiveness, however. It is coldly triumphant. If there is any phase in human feeling which is wholly strange to music, it is the sense of perfect physical condition, entailing an unruffled mind and the flawless working of the muscles, without excess, with only the enthusiasm of physical well-being, and this entirely equable. The rhapsody in E-flat, opus 119, No. 4, is thus normal.