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, * * * * * * * * And look like heralds of Eternity.”

The principal motive is a weird air, dark as the lurid hour which precedes a hurricane, in which we catch the fierce exclamations of exasperation, mingled with a bold defiance, recklessly hurled at the stormy elements.  The prolonged return of a tonic, at the commencement of each measure, reminds us of the repeated roar of artillery—­as if we caught the sounds from some dread battle waging in the distance.  After the termination of this note, a series of the most unusual chords are unrolled through measure after measure.  We know nothing analogous, to the striking effect produced by this, in the compositions of the greatest masters.  This passage is suddenly interrupted by a scene CHAMPETRE, a mazourka in the style of an Idyl, full of the perfume of lavender and sweet marjoram; but which, far from effacing the memory of the profound sorrow which had before been awakened, only augments, by its ironical and bitter contrast, our emotions of pain to such a degree, that we feel almost solaced when the first phrase returns; and, free from the disturbing contradiction of a naive, simple, and inglorious happiness, we may again sympathize with the noble and imposing woe of a high, yet fatal struggle.  This improvisation terminates like a dream, without other conclusion than a convulsive shudder; leaving the soul under the strangest, the wildest, the most subduing impressions.