Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saens? Oh, never think that this little symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and its sun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The "Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saens sings is not the arrogant son of Phoebus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursing through the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnish of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheels revolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air. But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the red dress of a singer of the Opera Comique. There is a runaway, and before the steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a few minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannot control in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely scratched. Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make music was not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperly dressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the _rue de la Paix_ or the _allee des Acacias_. It was too hot and wild and shy a thing, too passionately set in its course, too homesick for the white fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle tradition francaise." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that tradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to make music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the "terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach. Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naivete and joyousness! Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.