But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the "Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember what once we felt.