one another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe vast darkling forms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments of human intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The tenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art. And tenderness, after all, is the most intense of all emotions. A thousand years of culture live in this fineness. In these perfect gestures, in this grace, this certainty of choice, this justice of values, this simple, profound, delicate language, there live on thirty generations of gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames who developed the arts of life in the mild and fruitful valleys of "the pleasant land of France" speak here. The gentle sunlight and gentle shadow, the mild winters and mild summers of the Ile de France, the plentiful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine, contributed to making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. The instruction and cultivation of the classic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the gardens and galleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches sight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In every one of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "String Quartet" and "Pelleas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plus que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded and developed by the fertile, tranquil soil of France.