oman through the heart; giant through hope, mother through
sorrow; and poet through dreams." The Polish gentleman was chivalrous,
daring, and passionate; the heir of the most gifted and brilliant of the
Slavic races, with a proud heritage of memory which gave his bearing
an indescribable dignity, though the son of a fallen nation. Ardently
devoted to pleasure, the Poles embodied in their national dances wild
and inspiring rhythms, a glowing poetry of sentiment as well as motion,
which mingled with their Bacchanal fire a chaste and lofty meaning that
became at times funereal. Polish society at this epoch pulsated with an
originality, an imagination, and a romance, which transfigured even the
common things of life.

It was amid such an atmosphere that Chopin's early musical career was
spent, and his genius received its lasting impress. One afternoon in
after-years he was playing to one of the most distinguished women in
Paris, and she said that his music suggested to her those gardens in
Turkey where bright parterres of flowers and shady bowers were strewed
with gravestones and burial mounds.

This underlying depth of melancholy Chopin's music expresses most
eloquently, and it may be called the perfect artistic outcome of his
people; for in his sweetest tissues of sound the imagination can detect
agitation, rancor, revolt, and menace, sometimes despair. Chateaubriand
dreamed of an Eve innocent, yet fallen; ignorant of all, yet knowing
all; mistress, yet virgin. He found this in a Polish girl of seventeen,
whom he paints as a "mixture of Odalisque and Valkyr." The romantic
and fanciful passion of the Poles, bold, yet unworldly, is shown in the
habit of drinking the health of a sweetheart from her own shoe.

Chopin, intensely spiritual by temperament and fragile in health, born
an enthusiast, was colored through and through with the rich dyes of
Oriental passion; but with these were mingled the fantastic and ideal
elements which,

"Wrapped in sense, yet dreamed of heavenlier joys."

And so he went to Paris, the city of his fate, ripe for the tragedy of
his life. After the revolution of 1830, he started to go to London, and,
as he said, "passed through Paris." Yet Paris he did not leave till he
left it with Mme. Sand to live a brief dream of joy in the beautiful
isle of Majorca.

III.

Liszt describes Chopin in these words: "His blue eyes were more
spiritual than dreamy; his bland smile never writhed into bitternes