etc.; and he entered the university with the intention, as he imagined, of acquiring some of that culture.  But I fancy he deceived himself.  As a schoolboy, as we have just noted, he aspired to the glory of studentship; having won to that he seems to have rested content.  Certainly he did no work, attended no lectures.  His days and nights were devoted to two things, composition and politics.  With Apel and others whom he used to meet at a cafe he denounced governments, police officials and the rest of it; at home he composed overtures and finally a great symphony in C major.  It is hard to say which of his two occupations he took the more seriously.

The artist was growing up strong within him; but the injustice and robbery he saw perpetrated on every side of him, the wholesale theft of Poland by Russian officials—­by which I mean the Tsar, his ministers, his generals, soldiers, subservient judges and police—­set his blood aboil; and I suppose that, like other boys of his years, as well as many grown men, he fancied his talk would do something to put the world and society right.  But in no picture of his life at this time that I have come across is there any hint of the poetic atmosphere in which he should have lived.  Surely in those days before his health broke down, with his fervid imagination, his intimacy with the masterworks of music and poetry, he must have drawn in a richer air than the reek of a Leipzig cafe, his inner vision must have seen a diviner light than the common light of the stodgy Leipzig streets, with his inner ear he must have heard a music sweeter than the hoarse arguments of students half-filled with lager-beer.  In the accounts of this time there is not—­to use the phrase colloquially—­a touch of romance.  Even his letters are stodgy.  My surmise is that just as in his boyhood the musical part of his nature lay latent and unsuspected until Beethoven’s music awoke it, so now the poetic part lay fallow awhile, and he worked away at the technical side of his music, mastering form and conventional development of themes, and in his leisure spent his excess of energy in talking politics and metaphysics.  The C Symphony of the period can now be seen by all and has often been played; and it supports my view very forcibly.  When I say there is no hint of Wagner in it I do not mean that the phraseology does not resemble that of the later Wagner—­one could hardly expect that; I do mean that from Die Feen onward there is always atmosphere, always emotion and colour, in his music; while the symphony is as bald, as unpoetical, as any mean street in Kennington.  I do not doubt that he had his poetic dreams, because with such a nature he could not help it; but he must have been temporarily indifferent to them, absorbed in mastering the purely technical part of his business.  If we compare the letters of the time with, say, Keats’s and Shelley’s, it is startling to find him enthusing over the affairs of the parish and seemingly turning