history of classical instrumental art, it is in spirit representative of its own time and even anticipatory of the future; that it not only reflects the soul of the musician, poet, and philosopher, but is suggestive of the higher vision of the prophet. It is this fact, for those who accept it as a fact, that constitutes the highest significance of Brahms' first symphony, and lends a real meaning to Bülow's well-known apophthegm of 'the three B's': Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The shrill, clashing dissonances of the first introduction at once place the listener in the atmosphere of stern grandeur, passion, mystery, that surround, not this or that human life, but existence itself, in its apprehension by human intelligence; and the allegro to which it leads seems to the present writer to present as near an analogy as art can show to the processes of nature, built up as it is--first and second subjects and their treatment--from a few notes; from what one of the Vienna critics called 'mere twigs of thematic material'; from germs which are produced and reproduced, are transformed and reformed, and developed into a great organic whole instinct with noble, living melody. The solemnly fervent andante sostenuto, the graceful, innocent allegretto with its sufficiently contrasted trio, afford the mind the refreshment of change of tone after the stormy splendour of the first movement; but the note of tragedy is resumed with the first sounds of the wonderful adagio that precedes, and essentially contains, the allegro of the fourth movement. Here, for some twenty-eight bars, the tension of feeling increases till destiny itself seems to be held in suspense; then, with the resolution of a chromatic chord, the horn sounds the unexpected major third of the key in a six-four of the tonic triad, and, continuing its strange, passionate cry, gradually disperses the mists of doubt and apprehension that have held the hearer as in a thrall, and carries him forward to the sublimity of joy that dwells in the final allegro. 'The last movement of your C minor Symphony,' wrote Billroth to Brahms in 1890, fourteen years after its first performance, 'has again lately excited me fearfully. Of what avail is the perfect, clear beauty of the principal subject in its thematically complete form? The horn returns at length with its romantic, impassioned cry as in the introduction, and all palpitates with longing, rapture and supersensuous exaltation and bliss.'