Instrumentation, and all manner of elaboration--orchestral and choral--is of value only when it enhances and sets forth ideas, melodies, harmonies--in a word, musical forms which in themselves have the value which belongs to beauty and expression. Else, like the gift of tongues without the spirit of love, it is literally sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. There is in some of this work--notably in Wagner's--an evidence of sustaining power which deserves and commands a certain respect. But such sustaining power, so applied, is like figures of caryatides supporting some poor decadent frieze. They bend and strain and keep it up. But why, we are tempted to say to them, do you strain to keep up that poor, commonplace stuff, which would not be looked at if it stood not upon your heads? Let it fall! You are all that keep it from tumbling into a dust-heap and seeming the rubbish that it is. It seems to be a consciousness of their deficiency in melody and in emotional expression which drives such composers of the present day as aim to write in the higher style to make their music "interdependent, logarithmic, differential, integral, and corroborative," and to strive to make up in intellectual elaboration what they lack in inspiration. This condition of things in music is not to be bettered by endeavor. Genius alone can do that, when brought into contact with the power of appreciating genius. And genius, although conscious of its power, is ever ignorant of its tendency, and never works but for its own ends; while those who hear and understand its utterances do so with no higher purpose than the delight they bring them. When I hear a man talk of doing something to elevate his art, however much I may respect his taste, his acquirements, or his aims, I then begin to doubt, if I have not before doubted, his ability to write a sentence worth reading, to make a picture worth looking at, or a song worth hearing. RICHARD GRANT WHITE. SPRING. Spring gives the order, "Forward, march!" 'Tis borne along the eager line; Breathes through the boughs of rustling larch, And murmurs in the pine. "March!" At the sound, impatient, springs The mountain rill, with rippling glee, And rolling through the valley, brings Its tribute to the sea. "March!" and upon each sunny hill Old winter's allies, ice and snow, Start at the music of the rill, And join its onward flow. "March!" Down among the fibrous roots Of oaks we hear the summons ring. The long-chilled life-blood upward shoots To hail the coming spring. "March!" and along each narrow neck, Across the plain, and up the steep, The spring tide clears the winter's wreck With its resistless sweep. Advancing in unbroken lines, New allies rush to join its bands, Till winter, in despair, resigns The sceptre to its hands.