Harvey Worthington Loomis occupies not merely a unique place in American music, but one which is elusively so, and difficult of both determination and exposition. To place the delicate and fragile spirit of a Watteau or a Grétry in the midst of the hurly-burly of American life would seem a sorry anachronism, as well as anatopism, on the part of the Providence which rules over the destinies of art. Yet it is some such position that Loomis occupies, a fact which tends to explain why he has not received the attention at the hands of his countrymen that the rare originality, charm, and finish of his work merit. The court of Louis XVI would have opened its palaces and gardens to him, but the America of the twentieth century with difficulty finds standing room for him in the vestibule. Bringing with him such a nautilus-like spirit as animated the artists of an earlier France, he matured it in an America which as yet knew scarcely anything of any musical system or spirit beyond the German. It is, therefore, a wholly amazing phenomenon of art that, out of materials thus solid, Loomis contrived to fashion his aerial and delicately tinted fairy edifices of tone, of a character totally different from those of Teutons of the subtler sort, and foreshadowing the achievements of the later Frenchmen with a newly devised medium at their command. It is evidence of the purest kind of the yielding of matter to spirit. Consider that exquisite masterpiece, 'In the Moon Shower'--a very epitome in miniature of Loomis' genius--a setting of Verlaine's _L'heure exquise_ for singing voice, speaking voice, piano, and violin. It seems not to contain a harmony or a progression with which we have not long been made familiar by our Germanic system, and yet how complete the departure which it makes from the spirit of German tradition, and how utterly it dissolves the medium which it draws upon to re-materialize it as the shadowy reflection of a Verlaine dream. It is not that Loomis has not become familiar with, and in a measure assimilated, the later French idiom, but that, without the knowledge and employment of it, he earlier spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel. Loomis has also been exceedingly hospitable to native aboriginal themes and has treated them in the spirit of a delicate and refined impressionism. His technique is invariably of the nicest, with minute attention to every detail.