That within the space of twenty-four days, Handel penned the notes of his most glorious work, proves nothing but his enormous powers of mental concentration, and the endurance of a brain supported by a vigorous body; but to the vital question: How long had «The Messiah» been maturing in him? history affords no conclusive answer. Rossini was no doubt a facile composer, yet from what soul-deep his operas came is proved by his deliberate estimate of their longevity. He believed that as an entirety nothing but «Il Barbiere» would survive. The well-attested fact that Beethoven and Chopin, those cautious and self-critical composers, were both extempore performers par excellence, goes far toward proving the impromptu inferior to the finished after-product. And does not all this favor our view that from the birth-throes, and not from the painlessness of Genius, are born the masterpieces of every art? II Genius is essentially sympathetic and would draw all men into rapport with its world of light and love. Companioned it must be, aye, close companioned! But descend it will never because to Genius its world embodies more of reality than does all this terrestrial globe. Happy the master gathering around him his little following! Happy indeed the genius, the solitary being, who finds among men an ideal friend; one to whom self-explanation, so hateful to Genius, is needless; one who knows instinctively the soul life of the other! To Genius that friend is a proof of its mission; a witness that it lives not a thing more useless than the most ordinary mortal; an assurance that it yet will come into the fullness of its own. Such a friend Chopin was now to find within that great Paris which like a gigantic lodestone was drawing him to herself. Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, pianist and litterateur, was born in 1811, and in 1831, the date of Chopin's advent in the French capital, he was but twenty years of age, and so by two years the junior of the Pole. Soon the fame of the younger man would eclipse even that of Kalkbrenner, esteemed the first pianist of the day. Liszt was steadily nearing an eminence ever afterward his own against all comers, that of the world's unparalleled pianoforte virtuoso. The artist who, in days to come, would first divine and adequately measure the comprehensiveness of Wagner; the timely helper who would deem it a duty, a privilege, to aid and cheer the impecunious political refugee in the despondent years of his exile; the whole-hearted enthusiast whose determined arm would open for the composer of «Lohengrin,» the close-shut door of the Temple of Fame, was the friend in whom Chopin now saw reflected his own peculiar genius. As the painter, stepping backward from his easel, scans his work as a whole, and in the most favorable light, so, from the view-point of Liszt's intuitive rendering, Chopin better estimated his own productions than could otherwise have been possible.