shrieks of the nightbirds and his trombone hymn for the dead. [Illustration: Fac-simile autograph manuscript of an “Album Leaf” by Raff. ] He has achieved a greater fidelity of feeling and a subtler realism of tones, however, in his “Im Walde,” which is generally looked upon as his masterpiece. The first movement is intended to bring to the hearer’s mind the woods in the sunlit beauty of noon. The second reveals them to us in the suggestive shadow of twilight. In the third movement the composer entertains us with an airy and delicate dance of Dryads, a woodland scherzo in deed and in truth. In the fourth and last movement we have a musical embodiment of the familiar German legend of the Wild Huntsman. A gentle fugal thought pictures the repose of the woods. Suddenly the rhythm of the galloping hunt is heard, as it were, in the distance. Nearer and nearer it comes, till the whole orchestra thunders with its riotous fury. It dies away in the distance, returns and dies away again. Then comes the glory of sunrise. This symphony makes less demands in the way of preparation than many of Raff’s other works. The single suggestion that he is painting the forest and that there is a wild hunt is all that the imagination needs to give it complete enjoyment of this work. Freedom of form is a natural result of the kind of composition in which Raff excelled and his ability to write quickly and with little effort prevented his feeling the necessity of working out his compositions with the care and science of the classical school. One gets much less intellectual satisfaction, therefore, out of Raff’s work than out of Schumann’s, who was his precursor, and still less than out of Mozart’s. But the ear and the imagination are delighted by the clear intelligibility of his melodic ideas, their unfailing poetic sentiment and musical grace. It is these qualities of his themes, together with the splendid colors in which his orchestral palette is so rich, that have given to his symphonic works their wide popularity, and have made the name of Raff recognized as that of one of the really gifted followers of the romantic school founded by Schumann and Schubert. In the general outline his symphonies follow the laws of the earlier masters, notably in the distribution of the movements. His separate movements, however, are not always built according to the old rules, his finales being notably free and irregular. It can only be said, then, in concluding this brief estimate of his symphonic writing, that his works in the large orchestral form are admirable examples of that class of modern composition in which structural skill and scientific development are sacrificed to warmth of sentiment and opulence of color. In a word, they belong to what may be called the impressionist school of music.