composing "The Mount of Olives." A great variety of
chamber music, masses, and songs, bear the same imprint of power. He
may be called the most original and conscientious of all the composers.
Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn were inveterate
thieves, and pilfered the choicest gems from old and forgotten writers
without scruple. Beethoven seems to have been so fecund in great
conceptions, so lifted on the wings of his tireless genius, so austere
in artistic morality, that he stands for the most part above the
reproach deservedly borne by his brother composers.

Beethoven's principal title to fame is in his superlative place as a
symphonic composer. In the symphony music finds its highest intellectual
dignity; in Beethoven the symphony has found its loftiest master.

SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ.

I.

Heinrich Heine, in his preface to a translation of "Don Quixote,"
discusses the creative powers of different peoples. To the Spaniard
Cervantes is awarded the first place in novel-writing, and to our own
Shakespeare, of course, the transcendent rank in drama.

"And the Germans," he goes on to say, "what palm is due to them? Well,
we are the best writers of songs in the world. No people possesses such
beautiful _Lieder_ as the Germans. Just at present the nations have too
much political business on hand; but, after that has once been settled,
we Germans, English, Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Italians, will all go to
the green forest and sing, and the nightingale shall be umpire. I feel
sure that in this contest the song of Wolfgang Goethe will gain the
prize."

There are few, if any, who will be disposed to dispute the verdict of
the German poet, himself no mean rival, in depth and variety of lyric
inspiration, even of the great Goethe. But a greater poet than either
one of this great pair bears the suggestive and impersonal name of "The
People." It is to the countless wealth of the German race in folk-songs,
an affluence which can be traced back to the very dawn of civilization
among them, that the possibility of such lyric poets as Goethe, Heine,
Ruckert, and Uhland is due. From the days of the "Nibelungenlied," that
great epic which, like the Homeric poems, can hardly be credited to any
one author, every hamlet has rung with beautiful national songs, which
sprung straight from the fervid heart of the people. These songs are
balmy with the breath of the forest, the meadow, and river, and
have th