d’esprit que les Anglais appellent low spirits. L’intérêt momentané qu’il s’était efforcé de prendre aux changements politiques avait complètement disparu. Il était devenu plus silencieux (pie jamais ; si, par distraction, il lui échappait quelques mots, ce n’était qu’une exclamation de regret. A son départ, son affection pour le petit nombre de personnes qu’il continuait à voir, prenait les teintes douloureuses des émotions qui précèdent les derniers adieux. Son indifférence s’étendait de plus en plus ostensiblement au reste des choses.
Arrivé à Londres, il y fut accueilli avec un empressement qui l’électrisa et lui fit secouer sa tristesse ;
necessity of being in no less a degree a poet than a pianist, a thinker than a musician. Commonplace is instinctively avoided in all the works of Chopin ; a stale cadence or a Iritc progression, a hum-drum subject or a hackneyed sequence , a vulgar twist of the melody or a worn out passage, a meagre harmony or an unskilful counterpoint, may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions, the prevailing characteristics of which are, a feeling as uncommon as beautiful, a treatment as original as feliciluous, a melody and a harmony as new, fresh, vigorous and striking, ns Ihey are utterly unexpected and out of the ordinary track. In taking up one of the works of Chopin you are entering, as it were, a fairy land, untrodden by human foolsleps, a path hitherto unfrequented but by the great composer himself ; a faith and a devotion, a desire to appreciate, and a determination to understand, are absolutely necessary, to do it anything like adequate justice Chopin in his Polonaises and in his Mazoures has aimed at those characteristics which distinguish the national music of his country so markedly from that of all others, that quaint idiosyncrasy, that identical wildness and fantasticality, that delicious mingling of the sad and the cheerful, which invariably and forcibly individualize the music of those northern countries, whose language delights in combination of consonants »
