These musical backgrounds are played in accompaniment to dramatic recitations. Properly managed, the effect is most impressive. Feval's poem, "The Song of the Pear-tree," is a typically handled work. The poem tells the story of a young French fellow, an orphan, who goes to the wars as substitute for his friend Jean. After rising from rank to rank by bravery, he returns to his home just as his sweetheart, Perrine, enters the church to wed Jean. The girl had been his one ambition, and now in his despair he reenlists and begs to be placed in the thickest of danger. When he falls, they find on his breast a withered spray from the pear-tree under which Perrine had first plighted troth. On these simple lines the music builds up a drama. From the opening shimmer and rustle of the garden, through the Gregorian chant that solemnizes the drawing of the lots, and is interrupted by the youth's start of joy at his own luck (an abrupt _glissando_); through his sturdy resolve to go to war in his friend's place, on through many battles to his death, all is on a high plane that commands sympathy for the emotion, and enforces unbounded admiration for the art. There is a brief hint of the Marseillaise woven into the finely varied tapestry of martial music, and when the lover comes trudging home, his joy, his sudden knowledge of Perrine's faithlessness, and his overwhelming grief are all built over a long organ-point of three clangorous bride-bells. The _leit-motif_ idea is used with suggestive clearness throughout the work. The background to Longfellow's "Sandalphon" is so fine an arras that it gives the poet a splendor not usual to his bourgeois lays. The music runs through so many phases of emotion, and approves itself so original and exaltedly vivid in each that I put it well to the fore of American compositions. Hardly less large is the--Loomis calls it "Musical Symbolism," for Adelaide Ann Proctor's "The Story of the Faithful Soul." Of the greatest delicacy imaginable is the music (for piano, violin, and voice) to William Sharp's "Coming of the Prince." The "Watteau Pictures" are poems of Verlaine's variously treated: one as a head-piece to a wayward piano caprice, one to be recited during a picturesque waltz, the last a song with mandolin effects in the accompaniment. [Music: