various phases of his subject? Even in the midst of joy,
may he not be permitted to be gloomy and oppressed? After having chanted
the splendor of glory, may he not sing of grief? After having rejoiced
with the victorious, may he not mourn with the vanquished? We may,
without any fear of contradiction, assert, that it is not one of the
least merits of Chopin, that he has, consecutively, embraced ALL the
phases of which the theme is susceptible, that he has succeeded in
eliciting from it all its brilliancy, in awakening from it all its
sadness. The variety of the moods of feeling to which he was himself
subject, aided him in the reproduction and comprehension of such a
multiplicity of views. It would be impossible to follow the varied
transformations occurring in these compositions, with their pervading
melancholy, without admiring the fecundity of his creative force, even
when not fully sustained by the higher powers of his inspiration. He
did not always confine himself to the consideration of the pictures
presented to him by his imagination and memory, taken en masse, or as a
united whole. More than once, while contemplating the brilliant groups
and throngs flowing on before him, has he yielded to the strange charm
of some isolated figure, arresting it in its course by the magic of his
gaze, and, suffering the gay crowds to pass on, he has given himself
up with delight to the divination of its mystic revelations, while he
continued to weave his incantations and spells only for the entranced
Sibyl of his song.

His GRAND POLONAISE in F SHARP MINOR, must be ranked among his most
energetic compositions. He has inserted in it a MAZOURKA. Had he not
frightened the frivolous world of fashionable life, by the gloomy
grotesqueness with which he introduced it in an incantation so
fantastic, this mode might have become an ingenious caprice for the
ball-room. It is a most original production, exciting us like the
recital of some broken dream, made, after a night of restlessness, by
the first dull, gray, cold, leaden rays of a winter's sunrise. It is a
dream-poem, in which the impressions and objects succeed each other with
startling incoherency and with the wildest transitions, reminding us of
what Byron says in his "DREAM:"

"... Dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
* * * * * * *