Lochinvar, of course) is bending down and asking her to tread a measure. She,--but we must let Brown go on in his own way--"She looks still more down, flushes doubtless, and quietly in the shadow says 'No' and means 'yes'--says 'Yes' and fully means it, and they are off! All this small, whispered love-making and dainty device, this coaxing and being coaxed, is in the (all too short for us, but not for them) prelude to the waltz, the real business of the piece and evening. And then such a waltz for waltzing! Such precision and decision! Whisking them round, moulding them into twin orbs, hurrying them past and away from everything and everybody but themselves." And so old Brown goes on until you are almost dizzy with reading and entirely ready to vote that his rhapsody is only a little less delicious than Weber's music. The decadence of the liking for chamber music with wind instruments and of solos for them has relegated Weber's compositions for the clarinet and its brethren of the harmonious choir to the museum of musical history. It is then to his operas that we must go to study Weber's music as an expression of artistic feeling and conviction and as an influence. He was one of the forward men of his art, one whose principles and methods are as vital now as they were when he was yet alive in the body. In a very significant sense they are still new to a large portion of the musical world. They are just dawning in Italy. It is through Wagner's restatement of them that they are acquiring validity in new fields. Weber's full stature, indeed, can only be seen in the light which the example of Wagner throws upon him. This light goes out in several directions, but in each instance it discloses Weber as a precursor. The intense Teutonism of Wagner which led him to aim at a resurrection in a new and glorified body of the "dramma per musica" of the Florentine reformers was an inheritance from his father-in-art and predecessor as Capellmeister at the Dresden opera. The Romanticism of Weber displayed in his choice of subjects had a literary tincture; it went no further than it was propelled by the example of Tieck, Schlegel and their companions, and it was colored by the mystical and sentimental Catholicism which was one of the singular reactionary fruits of the Romantic movement in German literature. Wagner's Romanticism is that of a period in which the pendulum had swung back again; it is psychological, almost physiological. The old myths will not serve in their mediæval form; they must be reduced to their lowest terms. Yet though we note this difference in manifestation, the root of Wagner's Romanticism strikes through Weber's. We have seen how Weber's sincerity of purpose led him to overturn the humdrum routine of operatic representation. His made his intelligence and his feeling to illuminate all sides of the work in hand. He was an intermediary not only between the composer and the performers in all departments, but also between the