The songs of opus 3 are filled with physical energy. ‘Fidelity,’ the first of them, with its accompaniment of throbbing triplets, seems to tap some hidden source of power like a huge dynamo. We cannot see the source but we know there is much more where that came from. ‘Love and Spring’ suggests certain of the later Brahms qualities and the song from ‘Ivan’ seems like a shooting arrow in the vigor and directness of its expression. The same physical energy is shown in the ‘Spanish Song,’ in bolero tempo, in opus 6; and the peculiarly rich Brahms modulation is again revealed in ‘As the Clouds.’ The ‘Nightingale’ song from the same group is the first to foreshadow the increased technical elaboration which Brahms was later to give his accompaniments. Here the fluttering triplets in the piano are meant to suggest the winging of the birds, but it is easy to see that the purely technical problem which they created had fascinated the composer. And, except for this technical care, such an accompaniment would have overbalanced the melody. The _Anklänge_ of opus 7 has an elaborate syncopated accompaniment which shows the continuation of the technical concern; ‘The Return,’ from the same series, is another example of Brahms’ unsurpassed power to pour great energy into small compass. In opus 19 there are two more songs of the highest quality. One is ‘The Smith,’ to Uhland’s words, perhaps the shortest of all Brahms’ songs and certainly one of the most overwhelmingly effective. The maiden who speaks in Uhland’s delicious poem tells admiringly of her lover, who is a smith and who works all day amid the grime and the sparks. The melody, with that strange and very Brahmsian avoidance of the regular balancing of phrases which seems physically to condense great energy in a small compass, seems a succession of hammer blows. Each note has a ponderous weight of its own, but a weight which is followed by a fine rebound. The accompaniment, which is obviously intended to suggest flying sparks, is magically adapted to the peculiarities of the pianoforte. The short postlude, and, indeed, the whole of the accompaniment, is strikingly Wagnerian, recalling very closely the Valkyrie’s cry in _Die Walküre_. Such a detail is only one more proof of the foolishness of the artificial rivalry which stupid critics set up between Wagner and Brahms. The two men were great artists working in very different lines. As for their musical ideas, they could almost, at times, have been interchanged. The second remarkable song of opus 19 is the ‘Æolian Harp,’ one of the three or four most admired of all Brahms’ lyrics. This is one of the few that are in quite free form. It is almost a _scena_ rather than a song, since it opens with a recitative and is interrupted in the middle with free declamation. The Æolian harp sings in the west wind the lament of a Greek boy who had been taken to a distant land. Here Brahms’ marvellously colored harmonies have created