and the crashing dissonances of the sixteen introductory bars), and then shouts forth, sure of victory, his bold and scornful challenge?  And farther on, in the part of the polonaise where the ostinato semiquaver figure in octaves for the left hand begins, do we not hear the trampling of horses, the clatter of arms and spurs, and the sound of trumpets?  Do we not hear—­yea, and see too—­a high-spirited chivalry approaching and passing?  Only pianoforte giants can do justice to this martial tone-picture, the physical strength of the composer certainly did not suffice.

The story goes that when Chopin played one of his polonaises in the night-time, just after finishing its composition, he saw the door open, and a long train of Polish knights and ladies, dressed in antique costumes, enter through it and defile past him.  This vision filled the composer with such terror that he fled through the opposite door, and dared not return to the room the whole night.  Karasowski says that the polonaise in question is the last-mentioned one, in A flat major; but from M. Kwiatkowski, who depicted the scene three times, [footnote:  “Le Reve de Chopin,” a water-colour, and two sketches in oils representing, according to Chopin’s indication (d’apres l’avis de Chopin), the polonaise.] learned that it is the one in A major, No. 1 of Op. 40, dedicated to Fontana.

I know of no more affecting composition among all the productions of Chopin than the “Polonaise-Fantaisie” (in A flat major), Op. 61 (published in September, 1846).  What an unspeakable, unfathomable wretchedness reveals itself in these sounds!  We gaze on a boundless desolation.  These lamentations and cries of despair rend our heart, these strange, troubled wanderings from thought to thought fill us with intensest pity.  There are thoughts of sweet resignation, but the absence of hope makes them perhaps the saddest of all.  The martial strains, the bold challenges, the shouts of triumph, which we heard so often in the composer’s polonaises, are silenced.

An elegiac sadness [says Liszt] predominates, intersected by wild movements, melancholy smiles, unexpected starts, and intervals of rest full of dread such as those experience who have been surprised by an ambuscade, who are surrounded on all sides, for whom there dawns no hope upon the vast horizon, and to whose brain despair has gone like a deep draught of Cyprian wine, which gives a more instinctive rapidity to every gesture, a sharper point to every emotion, causing the mind to arrive at a pitch of irritability bordering on madness.

Thus, although comprising thoughts that in beauty and grandeur equal—­I would almost say surpass-anything Chopin has written, the work stands, on account of its pathological contents, outside the sphere of art.