amentations and cries of despair rend our heart,
these strange, troubled wanderings from thought to thought fill us with
intensest pity. There are thoughts of sweet resignation, but the absence
of hope makes them perhaps the saddest of all. The martial strains, the
bold challenges, the shouts of triumph, which we heard so often in the
composer's polonaises, are silenced.

An elegiac sadness [says Liszt] predominates, intersected by
wild movements, melancholy smiles, unexpected starts, and
intervals of rest full of dread such as those experience who
have been surprised by an ambuscade, who are surrounded on all
sides, for whom there dawns no hope upon the vast horizon, and
to whose brain despair has gone like a deep draught of Cyprian
wine, which gives a more instinctive rapidity to every
gesture, a sharper point to every emotion, causing the mind to
arrive at a pitch of irritability bordering on madness.

Thus, although comprising thoughts that in beauty and grandeur equal--I
would almost say surpass-anything Chopin has written, the work stands,
on account of its pathological contents, outside the sphere of art.

Chopin's waltzes, the most popular of his compositions, are not poesie
intime like the greater number of his works. [FOOTNOTE: Op. 34, No.
2, and Op. 64, No. 2, however, have to be excepted, to some extent at
least.] In them the composer mixes with the world-looks without him
rather than within--and as a man of the world conceals his sorrows and
discontents under smiles and graceful manners. The bright brilliancy and
light pleasantness of the earlier years of his artistic career, which
are almost entirely lost in the later years, rise to the surface in the
waltzes. These waltzes are salon music of the most aristocratic kind.
Schumann makes Florestan say of one of them, and he might have said it
of all, that he would not play it unless one half of the female dancers
were countesses. But the aristocraticalness of Chopin's waltzes is
real, not conventional; their exquisite gracefulness and distinction are
natural, not affected. They are, indeed, dance-poems whose content is
the poetry of waltz-rhythm and movement, and the feelings these indicate
and call forth. In one of his most extravagantly-romantic critical
productions Schumann speaks, in connection with Chopin's Op. 18, "Grande
Valse brillante," the first-published (in June, 1834) of his waltzes, of
"Chopin's body and mind elevating waltz,