The reader may perhaps already have asked the question—­What was Chopin like in his outward appearance?  As I have seen a daguerreotype from a picture painted when he was seventeen, I can give some sort of answer to this question.  Chopin’s face was clearly and finely cut, especially the nose with its wide nostrils; the forehead was high, the eyebrows delicate, the lips thin, and the lower one somewhat protruding.  For those who know A. Bovy’s medallion I may add that the early portrait is very like it; only, in the latter, the line formed by the lower jawbone that runs from the chin towards the ear is more rounded, and the whole has a more youthful appearance.  As to the expression, it is not only meditative but even melancholy.  This last point leads me naturally to another question.  The delicate build of Chopin’s body, his early death preceded by many years of ill-health, and the character of his music, have led people into the belief that from childhood he was always sickly in body, and for the most part also melancholy in disposition.  But as the poverty and melancholy, so also disappears on closer investigation the sickliness of the child and youth.  To jump, however, from this to the other extreme, and assert that he enjoyed vigorous health, would be as great a mistake.  Karasowski, in his eagerness to controvert Liszt, although not going quite this length, nevertheless overshoots the mark.  Besides it is a misrepresentation of Liszt not to say that the passage excerpted from his book, and condemned as not being in accordance with the facts of the case, is a quotation from G. Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani (of which more will be said by-and-by), in which the authoress is supposed, although this was denied by her, to have portrayed Chopin.  Liszt is a poet, not a chronicler; he must be read as such, and not be taken au pied de la lettre.  However, even Karasowski, in whom one notices a perhaps unconscious anxiety to keep out of sight anything which might throw doubt on the health and strength of his hero, is obliged to admit that Chopin was “delicate,” although he hastens to add, “but nevertheless healthy and pretty strong.”  It seems to me that Karasowski makes too much of the statement of a friend of Chopin’s—­namely, that the latter was, up to manhood, only once ill, and then with nothing worse than a cold.  Indeed, in Karasowski’s narrative there are not wanting indications that the health of Chopin cannot have been very vigorous; nor his strength have amounted to much; for in one place we read that the youth was no friend of long excursions on foot, and preferred to lie down and dream under beautiful trees; in another place, that his parents sent him to Reinerz and some years afterwards to Vienna, because they thought his studies had affected his health, and that rest and change of air and scene would restore his strength.  Further, we are told that his mother and sisters never tired of recommending him to wrap up carefully in cold and wet weather, and that, like a good son and