It seems about time for us to return to our Ambros and study his admirable book on the "Boundaries of Music and Poetry." Here is his just and convincing conclusion: "But in its ideal feature, music keeps within its natural boundaries so long as it does not undertake to go beyond its expressional capacity,--that is, so long as the poetical thought of the composer becomes intelligible from the moods called forth by his work and the train of ideas stimulated thereby, that is, from the composition itself; and so long as nothing foreign, not organically connected with the music itself, must be dragged in in order to assist comprehension." How many of our ultra-refined orchestral studies in logic will stand examination in the searching light of that proclamation? Yet Ambros comes to that conclusion at the end of a volume written in answer to Hanslick's "The Beautiful in Music," of which the fundamental doctrine is that music has not expressional power at all. Ambros set out to show that it had, but that there was a point beyond which it could not go. That point he found set clearly in view in the symphonic works of Berlioz. He recounts the process of development of that master's "Romeo et Juliette" symphony. He compares it with Mendelssohn's "Meerestille und Glückliche Fahrt" overture, and notes that the title of the latter is an exact reproduction of Goethe's language. But "there is in the matter the great difference that this tonal work, even utterly apart from Goethe's poem, is in and through itself explicable and intelligible, and bears in itself its æsthetic centre of gravity and the conditions of its existence, whereas in the case of 'Romeo and Juliet' the centre of gravity lies outside, the music,--that is to say, in the Shakespearian drama." Mendelssohn, when he conceived his "Fingal's Cave" overture, embodied in a sentence the impeccable theory of correctly conceived programme music. He wrote to his sister that he could not describe such a thing, but he could play it. Having absorbed the mood of that landscape, he, being a musician, could reproduce it only in tones. Berlioz, on the other hand, sought not only to picture in his music the personalities and passions of the lovers, but he sought to reproduce in the form of a scherzo the poetic description of an imaginary conception, Queen Mab, put into the mouth of a character created by Shakespeare! It was a long way round, was it not?