ayed with an exotic _rubato_, their fragrance
vanishes. There is more local color in the mazurkas than in any of
his other works. The Mazurs are musically a highly gifted nation, and
Chopin was impressed early in life with the quaint originality of
their melodies. No doubt some of his mazurkas are merely artistic
settings of these old love songs, but they are the settings of an
inspired jeweller. If we can judge by the number of pieces of each
class that he wrote, the mazurka was Chopin's favorite form. Even on
his death-bed he wrote one. It was his last effort, and he was too
weak to try it over on the piano. It is of heart-rending sadness, and
exquisite pathos. Perhaps it was a patriotic rather than an aesthetic
feeling which led him thus to favor the mazurka. His love for his
country was exceeded only by his devotion to his art. "Oh, how sad it
must be to die in a foreign country," he wrote to a friend in 1830;
and when, soon afterward, he left home he took along a handful of
Polish soil which he kept for nineteen years. Shortly before his death
he expressed a wish that it should be strewn in his coffin--a wish
which was fulfilled; so that his body rested on Polish soil even in
Paris.

A countless number of exquisite melodic rhythmic and harmonic details
in the mazurkas might be dwelt upon in this place, but I will only
call attention to the inexhaustible variety of ideas which makes each
of them so unique, notwithstanding their strong family likeness. They
are like fantastic orchids, or like the countless varieties of humming
birds, those "winged poems of the air," of which no two are alike
while all resemble each other.

The nocturnes represent the dreamy side of Chopin's genius. They are
sufficiently popular, yet few amateurs have any idea of their
unfathomable depth, and few know how to use the pedal in such a way as
to produce the rich uninterrupted flow of tone on which the melody
should float. Most pianists play them too fast. Mozart and Schumann
protested against the tendency to take their slow pieces too fast, and
Chopin suffers still more from this pernicious habit. Mendelssohn in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," and Weber in "Oberon," have given us
glimpses of dreamland, but Chopin's nocturnes take us there bodily,
and plunge us into reveries more delicious than the visions of an
opium eater. They should be played in the twilight and in solitude,
for the slightest foreign sound breaks the spell. But just as