The compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable. And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallization and diaphinity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as the precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, they would crumble. This, might have been a flower. But now it glistens with crystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But their fires are quenched. These candied petals are the passage from "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs naives," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pre toute emeraude." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered "a sea-change Into something rich and strange" is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, the setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "a La Villette," and the Malaguena, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.