Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart. How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may be gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck his position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the man had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced little of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata "Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet. The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with the re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the noble and delicate "Prelude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Beatitudes," completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man had finally been formed. And, in swift succession, there came from his worktable the series of compositions, the "Prelude, chorale et fugue" for piano, the sonata, the symphonic poem "Psyche," the symphony, the quartet and the three chorales for organ that fully disclose his genius. There is scarcely another example in all musical history of so long retarded a flowering.