painted many pictures, bearing many different titles, but all are mere rearrangements of the same figures and setting. We find, to a greater extent than with most composers, that his whole art is fairly represented in his songs. They are numerous. And they are of a very high order of musicianship. It is evident Debussy put the best he had into these songs. They are luxuriant with the finest inventions of his remarkable technique. Not one is carelessly executed. Not one but is in some degree truly creative. Whether simple or abstruse, they make no concessions to popular effect. Some are valuable chiefly in their parts; as a whole they are not firmly bound. But others are admirable in design and proportion. In most of them the accompaniment is so luxuriant that set form goes by the board; the song consists of its various parts. But in the accumulation of these various sensuous effects we get a new kind of unity. It is the unity of the impressionist painters--a synthesis performed in the observer or listener instead of being performed in the work itself. To speak concretely, the various parts reveal sometimes little to connect them with each other; they seem little amenable to any formal scheme. But when the listener simply listens, without trying to apply mental standards, he finds that he has lived through a single and definite _experience_. It is hard to speak in detail of Debussy’s songs. They present so many individual elements of interest that, if they are to be studied at all, they must be studied in the concrete. Any attempt to describe or characterize them at a distance must be vague and colorless. We can only point out a few of the songs that stand out from the others by reason of great technical originality or impressionistic power. Debussy gained the _grand Prix de Rome_ in 1884 and spent the next three years in Italy. His prize cantata, ‘The Prodigal Son,’ shows evidences of the impressionistic style, but, being offered to please a conservative committee, was kept in reserve. But Debussy knew what he wanted to do and promptly sent back from the Villa Medici a work which the committee could not accept because of its daring style. Even then he was approaching maturity in the manner which made him famous. The first of the well known songs were published in 1890 and were probably written in the course of the five years just preceding. They are not so involved as the later songs, but they cannot be called experimental works. The _Mandoline_, a masterly little genre song, has attained great popularity, and ‘The Fountain’ shows the composer working on a most elaborate scale with a fully developed technical method. We should also mention in this place the famous aria, ‘Azaël,’ from ‘The Prodigal Son.’ The most strongly creative of Debussy’s works (exclusive of the opera) seem to centre around the year 1904. And here we find some of the best songs. We may instance the five fine ‘Poems’ from Baudelaire.