In Chopin, the subject of this study, the blood of two nations met and mingled. The France of his father, and the Poland of his mother, could each with equal justice claim him as its own. Chopin was born in the vicinity of Warsaw, on March 1, 1809, and in the capital city of the Grand Duchy, created by Napoleon, he was educated musically until the age of twelve, an age when the average musician enters upon his pupilage. Then it was deemed best by his professors that he be left to the self-development of his unique individuality. Naturally our precocious child, our future composer _sui generis_, was now the pet of the aristocracy; the plaything of that class which, as a whole, not only in Warsaw, but also in pretty much the world over, lived, as now it lives, to be amused and served by those who, in a land of democratic opportunities, would soon be its acknowledged superiors. For an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polishing to the many exactions of polite society is an undertaking questionable indeed. To come into outward conformity with mere convention is to imperil the freedom of his inner individuality. The actual effect of such a course on the genius of Chopin cannot be determined; that it survived the ordeal is proof enough of its virility and tenacity of purpose. As we have hinted, the world of the Musician, unlike that of the severely practical man, has no fixed diameter; elastic, it widens at his will; at the bidding of his sympathies it stretches until co-extensive with the globe. Thus it gathers into its circumference every land where live and labor his brethren in the art. And so we find our youthful composer looking beyond the limits of his Warsaw, looking and longing for physical contact with that with which his heart was already in rapport; Dresden and Prague and Berlin, but chiefly Vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the memories and bequeathings of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert. There could be heard, in its unfading loveliness, the «Freischütz» of Weber in whom Romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. There such pianists as Czerny and Hummel would discover to Chopin his failings, or prove his merits to be all his own. And then, far off as the horizon of his daydreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the Seine, the siren city sweet of voice and fair of form; the heartless, hope-wrecking city beneath whose mocking eye the unheard Wagner in after years must chafe and struggle and starve and almost cease to be. Chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist. Though deemed ultra by many a contemporary critic, to us he stands revealed the great tone-poet of the piano; the Keats, or rather the Shelley of musicians; the inimitable modern from whom the groping and straining virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retrograded.