Schubert tried it through, liked it, and said, in his Vienna dialect,
"I say, the song's not so bad; _whose is it?_" so completely, in a
fortnight, had it vanished from his mind. Grove recalls the fact that
Sir Walter Scott once similarly attributed a song of his own to Byron;
"but this was in 1828, after his mind had begun to fail."
There is no reason for doubting Vogel's story when we bear in mind the
enormous fertility of Schubert. He was unquestionably the most
spontaneous musical genius that ever lived. Vogel, who knew him
intimately, used the very word _clairvoyance_ in referring to his
divine inspirations, and Sir George Grove justly remarks that, "In
hearing Schubert's compositions, it is often as if one were brought
more immediately and closely into contact with music itself, than is
the case in the works of others; as if in his pieces the stream from
the great heavenly reservoir were dashing over us, or flowing through
us, more directly, with less admixture of any medium or channel, than
it does in those of any other writer--even of Beethoven himself. And
this immediate communication with the origin of music really seems to
have happened to him.
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