The biographical details of this period of Chopin’s life have to be drawn almost wholly from his letters.  These, however, must be judiciously used.  Those addressed to his parents, important as they are, are only valuable with regard to the composer’s outward life, and even as vehicles of such facts they are not altogether trustworthy, for it is always his endeavour to make his parents believe that he is well and cheery.  Thus he writes, for instance, to his friend Matuszyriski, after pouring forth complaint after complaint:—­“Tell my parents that I am very happy, that I am in want of nothing, that I amuse myself famously, and never feel lonely.”  Indeed, the Spectator’s opinion that nothing discovers the true temper of a person so much as his letters, requires a good deal of limitation and qualification.  Johnson’s ideas on the same subject may be recommended as a corrective.  He held that there was no transaction which offered stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse:—­

In the eagerness of conversation the first emotions of the mind burst out before they are considered.  In the tumult of business, interest and passion have their genuine effect; but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down by design to depreciate his own character.  Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity; for by whom can a man so much wish to be thought better than he is, as by him whose kindness he desires to gain or keep?

These one-sided statements are open to much criticism, and would make an excellent theme for an essay.  Here, however, we must content ourselves with simply pointing out that letters are not always calm and deliberate performances, but exhibit often the eagerness of conversation and the impulsiveness of passion.  In Chopin’s correspondence we find this not unfrequently exemplified.  But to see it we must not turn to the letters addressed to his parents, to his master, and to his acquaintances--there we find little of the real man and his deeper feelings—­ but to those addressed to his bosom-friends, and among them there are none in which he shows himself more openly than in the two which he wrote on December 25, 1830, and January 1, 1831, to John Matuszynski.  These letters are, indeed, such wonderful revelations of their writer’s character that I should fail in my duty as his biographer were I to neglect to place before the reader copious extracts from them, in short, all those passages which throw light on the inner working of this interesting personality.

Dec. 25, 1830.—­I longed indescribably for your letter; you know why.  How happy news of my angel of peace always makes me!  How I should like to touch all the strings which not only call up stormy feelings, but also awaken again the songs whose half-dying echo is still flitting on the banks of the Danube-songs which the warriors of King John Sobieski sang!

   You advised me to choose a poet.  But you know I am an
   undecided being, and succeeded only once in my life in making
   a good choice.