These all were the teachers that made Chopin a melodist; but he was more than a melodist, more than the harmonist we have indicated; he was a great, national tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized his Poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versifiers. The individuality of Chopin the composer was distinguishable as that of Beethoven and Wagner. He was above the mere perfector of types. His Scherzos, his Preludes, his Ballades, his Fantaisies are original conceptions. On the rhythm of the Polish dance he reared his dainty Mazurkas. Graceful and ethereal, they yielded like the slender pine to every swaying wind. Framed to endure, no blast could overthrow them. On the same national foundation uprose his Polonaises, an architecture of his own devising. Fantastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly expressive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the tempest proved them pliant and yet enduringly based as the deep-rooted giants of the wood. The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach and Clementi, must encounter others quite different in the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming through certain of them. His muscles tire in the midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole pages. His fingers, trained to anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist of our day to conquer them. But, more important than the mechanical, there is in Chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. It informed his playing with an ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet lives, a tradition of the old Paris days. Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was not privileged to sound the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the stiletto, the Italian temperament is alone adequate. It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must surge from the heart to the finger tips. These examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the Polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to art.