and the right mood for developing, completing, and giving the last touch to the rest was gone, and could not be found again.  Schumann, after expressing his admiration for these preludes, as well he might, adds:  “This book contains morbid, feverish, and repellent matter.”  I do not think that there is much that could justly be called repellent; but the morbidity and feverishness of a considerable portion must be admitted.

I described the preludes [writes Schumann] as remarkable.  To confess the truth, I expected they would be executed like the studies, in the grandest style.  Almost the reverse is the case; they are sketches, commencements of studies, or, if you will, ruins, single eagle-wings, all strangely mixed together.  But in his fine nonpareil there stands in every piece:—­ “Frederick Chopin wrote it.”  One recognises him by the violent breathing during the rests.  He is, and remains, the proudest poet-mind of the time.

The almost infinite and infinitely-varied beauties collected in this treasure-trove denominated Vingt-quatre Preludes could only be done justice to by a minute analysis, for which, however, there is no room here.  I must content myself with a word or two about a few of them, picked out at random.  No. 4 is a little poem the exquisitely-sweet languid pensiveness of which defies description.  The composer seems to be absorbed in the narrow sphere of his ego, from which the wide, noisy world is for the time being shut out.  In No. 6 we have, no doubt, the one of which George Sand said that it occurred to Chopin one evening while rain was falling, and that it “precipitates the soul into a frightful depression."30 [Footnote:  See George Sand’s account and description in Chapter XXI., p. 43.] How wonderfully the contending rhythms of the accompaniment, and the fitful, jerky course of the melody, depict in No. 8 a state of anxiety and agitation!  The premature conclusion of that bright vivacious thing No. 11 fills one with regret.  Of the beautifully-melodious No. 13, the piu lento and the peculiar closing bars are especially noteworthy.  No. 14 invites a comparison with the finale of the B flat minor Sonata.  In the middle section (in C sharp minor) of the following number (in D flat major), one of the larger pieces, rises before one’s mind the cloistered court of the monastery of Valdemosa, and a procession of monks chanting lugubrious prayers, and carrying in the dark hours of night their departed brother to his last resting-place.  It reminds one of the words of George Sand, that the monastery was to Chopin full of terrors and phantoms.  This C sharp minor portion of No. 15 affects one like an oppressive dream; the re-entrance of the opening D flat major, which dispels the dreadful nightmare, comes upon one with the smiling freshness of dear, familiar nature—­ only after these horrors of the imagination can its serene beauty be fully appreciated.  No. 17, another developed piece, strikes one as akin