all open, frank, primitive impressions disappear in them; before
they meet the eye, they have passed through the prism of an exacting,
ingenious, and fertile imagination, and it has become difficult if not
impossible to resolve them again into their primal elements. Acuteness
of discernment is required to understand, delicacy to describe them.
In seizing such refined impressions with the keenest discrimination, in
embodying them with infinite art, Chopin has proved himself an artist of
the highest order. It is only after long and patient study, after having
pursued his sublimated ideas through their multiform ramifications, that
we learn to admire sufficiently, to comprehend aright, the genius with
which he has rendered his subtle thoughts visible and palpable, without
once blunting their edge, or ever congealing their fiery flow.

He was so entirely filled with the sentiments whose most perfect types
he believed he had known in his own youth, with the ideas which it alone
pleased him to confide to art; he contemplated art so invariably from
the same point of view, that his artistic preferences could not fail
to be influenced by his early impressions. In the great models and
CHEFS-D'OEUVRE, he only sought that which was in correspondence with
his own soul. That which stood in relation to it pleased him; that which
resembled it not, scarcely obtained justice from him. Uniting in himself
the frequently incompatible qualities of passion and grace he possessed
great accuracy of judgment, and preserved himself from all petty
partiality, but he was but slightly attracted by the greatest beauties,
the highest merits, when they wounded any of the phases of his poetic
conceptions. Notwithstanding the high admiration which he entertained
for the works of Beethoven, certain portions of them always seemed to
him too rudely sculptured; their structure was too athletic to please
him, their wrath seemed to him too tempestuous, their passion too
overpowering, the lion-marrow which fills every member of his phases was
matter too substantial for his tastes, and the Raphaelic and Seraphic
profiles which are wrought into the midst of the nervous and powerful
creations of this great genius, were to him almost painful from the
force of the cutting contrast in which they are frequently set.

In spite of the charm which he acknowledged in some of the melodies of
Schubert, he would not willingly listen to those in which the contours
were too s