producing that involution, that tortuosity of thought, which mark
his latest works. Almost suffocating under the oppression of
repressed feelings, using art only to repeat and rehearse for
himself his own internal tragedy, after having wearied emotion,
he began to subtilize it. His melodies are actually tormented; a
nervous and restless sensibility leads to an obstinate
persistence in the handling and rehandling and a reiterated
pursuit of the tortured motifs, which impress us as painfully as
the sight of those physical or mental agonies which we know can
find relief only in death. Chopin was a victim to a disease
without hope, which growing more envenomed from year to year,
took him, while yet young, from those who loved him, and laid him
in his still grave. As in the fair form of some beautiful victim,
the marks of the grasping claws of the fierce bird of prey which
has destroyed it, may be found; so, in the productions of which
we have just spoken, the traces of the bitter sufferings which
devoured his heart, are painfully visible.



CHAPTER II.

National Character of the Polonaise--Oginski--Meyseder--Weber--
Chopin--His Polonaise in F Sharp, Minor--Polonaise--Fantaisie.



It must not be supposed that the tortured aberrations of feeling
to which we have just alluded, ever injure the harmonic tissue in
the works of Chopin on the contrary, they only render it a more