choly saddening,
for whatever his moments of cheerfulness might be, he never
for all that got rid of a feeling which formed, as it were,
the soil of his heart, and for which he found a name only in
his mother-tongue, no other possessing an equivalent to the
Polish word zal [sadness, pain, sorrow, grief, trouble,
repentance, &c.]. Indeed, he uttered the word repeatedly, as
if his ear had been eager for this sound, which for him
comprised the whole scale of the feelings which is produced by
an intense plaint, from repentance to hatred, blessed or
poisoned fruits of this acrid root.

After a long dissertation on the meaning of the word zal, Liszt, from
whose book this quotation is taken, proceeds thus:--

Yes, truly, the zal colours with a reflection now argent, now
ardent, the whole of Chopin's works. It is not even absent
from his sweetest reveries. These impressions had so much the
more importance in the life of Chopin that they manifested
themselves distinctly in his last works. They little by little
attained a kind of sickly irascibility, reaching the point of
feverish tremulousness. This latter reveals itself in some of
his last writings by a distortion of his thought which one is
sometimes rather pained than surprised to meet. Suffocating
almost under the oppression of his repressed transports of
passion, making no longer use of the art except to rehearse to
himself his own tragedy, he began, after having sung his
feeling, to tear it to pieces.

Read together with my matter-of-fact statements, Liszt's hyperbolical
and circumlocutional poetic prose will not be misunderstood by the
reader. The case may be briefly summed up thus. Zal is not to be found
in every one of Chopin's compositions, but in the greater part of
them: sometimes it appears clearly on the surface, now as a smooth
or lightly-rippled flow, now as a wildly-coursing, fiercely-gushing
torrent; sometimes it is dimly felt only as an undercurrent whose
presence not unfrequently becomes temporarily lost to ear and eye.
We must, however, take care not to overlook that this zal is not
exclusively individual, although its width and intensity are so.

The key-note [of Polish songs] [says the editor and translator
into German of an interesting collection of Folk-songs of the
Poles][FOOTNOTE: Volkslieder der Polen. Gesammelt und
ubersetzt von W. P. (Leipzig,1833).] is melancholy--even in
playful and na