Prior to his day, Bach and Beethoven had explored the known world of harmony. They knew the geography of its vast continents, the choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys and plains. They had measured its waterways, had sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then Ludwig Spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from Gibraltar even to the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring for this was the deed of Chopin. He, the Columbus of composers, gave to Harmony a new world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting storm. Many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the weird, the exquisite. Ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! Every appliance of the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or else of the polar star. He had calculated to a nicety the deflections of the needle. Though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even for Richard Strauss that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all. An erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of the author of «Norma,» characterize Chopin the melodist. In the new world by him discovered, his own before-mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of rare and differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of half-grown forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's red kindling ere the sun, or throated with the orange of the fading eve, or mottled with the melancholy grey which tells the night. And some there were a purity of white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud; and some whose tufty blue was borrowed from no sky like ours. Of these creatures of the composer's realm, each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty was the symbol. Amidst the morning wood, one lifted to the sun a brief yet brilliant song of transport; another's notes were cadenced from beside the splash of shaded waterfalls when noon was burning all the fields. Another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender plaint, or trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell; and when the round and tropic moon had touched the listening groves to silver, a rarer than the nightingale would warble from the branching palms.