And yet how refreshing to the spirit it is to hear after a Strauss tone preachment some such work of pure feeling as Schumann's Spring symphony! Here is no fugued fuddle of the fulminations of science. Here is no heart-wrung cry of a philosopher from the mountain top, come down to set whole the disjointed times and wailing because the populace thinks him a goatherd. Here is no dissector of sated souls, no juggler with death rattles, no miser of a hope-drained race. Here is one who served and suffered for the sake of love's infinite joy, who has trod the valley of the shadow and come to the sunlit plateau of his heart's desire, and who, as he lifts his brow to the radiance of the new day, strikes his lyre and bursts into a pæan of rapture. His music glows and throbs with feeling, for it is feeling grown too great for the inflection of common speech and so hymned to us by the myriad-voiced orchestra in one beautiful anthem of the budding of eternal spring in the heart of a man. That is programme music which needs no explanatory notes. "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for to-night." How often shall we who are treading the downward slopes of life croon that old couplet and yearn for the cradle songs of Schubert and Beethoven? How often, too, we wonder, will a weary world turn back with weary brain from the sordid task of transfretating "the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul" with Strauss and his tribe to the poets of the dawn who smote the great primeval chords of human feeling? This we may not now answer, for orchestral music is yet in her infancy and it is possible that the period of to-day is but the disturbance of a transition. IV.--STRAUSS AND THE SONG WRITERS He hath songs, for man or woman, of all sizes. _A Winter's Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 3. In the domain of the song new developments have come forward with startling rapidity in recent years. Every student of musical history is familiar with the growth of what is called the art song. The folk song was a simple form, in which a good, round tune, once made, served for every stanza. The early composers of songs were content to adhere to this form, which had its musical claim for supremacy, just as the Italian opera had. But after a time the imperious demand of text for appropriate embodiment compelled a departure from the old manner. Mozart set a pretty fashion when he composed "Das Veilchen" and altered the germinal thematic idea, by a process similar to symphonic development, to meet the varying sentiment of the verse. But not much was accomplished till the birth of the so-called romantic movement. This was really nothing more than the victory of a principle, which had for centuries been striving for dominion, and it led the world to enthusiastic adoration of the songs of Schubert and the operas of Weber.