rooted in that of the last century that he could not place himself wholly upon this level. His violations of conventional forms are less the fruit of necessity than the product of incapacity. His Romanticism, except that phase which we have already discussed in connection with his patriotic lyrics, had more of an external nature and genesis--it sprang from the subjects of his operas. The treatment of these subjects by an instinctively truthful musical dramatist was bound to produce the features in which that which is chiefly characteristic in Weber's music is found. The supernaturalism of "Der Freischütz" and "Oberon," the chivalresque sentiment of "Euryanthe" and the national tinge of "Preciosa," all made new demands upon music so soon as the latter came to be looked upon as only one vehicle of dramatic expression instead of the chief business of the piece. The musical investiture of necessity borrowed local elements from the subject. Without losing its prerogative as an expounder of the innermost feelings of the drama it acquired a decorative capacity so far as the externals of the play were concerned. Music became frankly delineative. Whatever may be thought of descriptive music in connection with the absolute forms of the art there can be no question as to its justification in the lyric drama where text, action and scenery are so many programmes, or guides to the purposes of the composer and the fancy of the listener. The more material kind of delineation, that which helped to heighten the effect of the stage pictures, to paint the terrors of the Wolf's Glen with its infernal rout as well as the dewy freshness of the forest and the dainty grace of the tripping elves, was paired with another kind far more subtle. The people of the play, like their prototypes in the mediæval romances, ceased to be representatives of universal types, and became instead individuals who borrowed physiognomy from time, environment and race. To give expression to the attributes thus acquired it became necessary to study the characteristics of those popular publications of emotion which had remained outside the artificial forms of expression. The voice of the German people with their love for companionship, the chase and nature, and their instinctive devotion to the things which have survived as relics of a time when their racial traits were fixed in them, Weber caught up from the Folk-song, which ever and anon in the history of art, when music has threatened to degenerate into inelastic formalism, has breathed into it the breath of life. For the delineation of spiritual characteristics Weber utilized the melodic and rhythmic elements of the people's self-created popular songs; for material delineation his most potent agency was instrumentation. To the band he gave a share in the representation such as only Beethoven, Mozart and Gluck before him had dreamed of. The most striking feature of his treatment of the orchestra is his emancipation of the wood-wind choir.