can guess the secret of his power. If you wish me
to present you a recipe for doing a deathless performance, I would give
you this: Work, travel, solitude, prayer, and yet again--work.

[Illustration: FREDERIC CHOPIN]

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Nature does not design like art, however realistic she may be. She
has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very
mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is
too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these
inconsequences which God alone can allow Himself to create, and
which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle,
gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a
legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself. Hence arose
sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves
on a determined object.

--_George Sand in "The Story of My Life"_

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I can not help believing that the
spirit of man will live again somewhere in a better world than ours.
Fenelon says, "Justice demands another life in order to make good the
inequalities of this." Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long
before they can see them. They know where they ought to be, and training
their telescopes in that direction they wait, knowing they will find.

Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth,
for the simple reason that we can not imagine anything we have not seen;
we may make new combinations, but the whole is all made up of parts of
things with which we are familiar. This great green earth out of which
we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies, and to
which our bodies must return to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.

But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and
intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says, "Arise and get
thee hence, for this is not thy rest." And the greater and nobler and
more sublime the spirit, the more constant the discontent. Discontent
may come from various causes, so it will not do to assume that the
discontented are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that the
wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness. The
more you study and appreciate this life, the more sure you are that this
is not all. You pillow your head upon Mother Earth, listen to her
heart-thr