thing enduring, an epitome of all his powers. Oak-ribbed, wealth-laden voyager on the sea of Time, how bravely it breasts the waves that long have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre talent and seeming genius and empty pretence! Schumann, discoverer of the genius of Chopin, was a musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopolitan, a radical in the van of æsthetic progress and, inevitably, the soul of the new musical romanticism. Almost any page, almost any stanza of Shelley--most ethereal of word-poets--would indicate an unobstructed outpouring which the first drafts of even his wholly sustained inspirations quite disprove. Beethoven's collected sketch-books are a study in the evolution of themes afterward impressed with the seal of spontaneity. We are told by one who ought to know, that Chopin's every opus was born only after soul-travail both long and sore. Against these curious facts can be set this apparent contradiction: facility is the rule among the merely talented, and many such have with ease dashed off their best efforts, of which doing they are wont to boast because, to the popular way of thinking, facility is proof of genius. Now why should Shelley and Beethoven and Chopin wrestle with the idea, and Pollok and Czerny and their kind be so easily victorious? As we have said, our human world is subdivisible into manifold states of consciousness, each a world to its dwellers. The world of the man of talent may be, and usually is, but a step inward from the world of the multitude; hence few obstacles hinder communication between these nearly-related worlds. The ideas of the inner are with ease translated to the understanding of the outer. Evidently this is untrue of those inmost worlds where dwell the deep- and high-dreaming Poet and Musician whose respective domains are almost outside of time and space, those limitations wherewith the human mind divides the known from the unknown, the sensible from the super-sensible, the finite from the Infinite. Having in them little or nothing of the quantitative, the ideas of those worlds elude the mental grasp of all save the finely-organized man of genius. How to come into touch with the great, common world by giving fixed form to that which is formless and by rendering tangible the intangible, making seen the unseen, felt the unfelt, and heard the unheard, is the problem of Genius. It was the problem of Michel Angelo before the unchiselled «David»; the problem of Raphael musing upon the Madonnaless canvas; the problem of the absorbed Beethoven when, in his seemingly aimless meanderings, the trees by the roadside and in the forest would prompt him to solution with their whispered «Holy! Holy!» and it was the problem of Chopin as in the quiet of his study, apart from the roar of the great city, the empty page tormented him with the thought of unwritten and perhaps unwritable beauties.