It is with something of a mournful feeling that we find ourselves at the close of our enumeration of the master's four greatest instrumental works. Enough, we may hope, has been said to indicate that any comparison of the symphonies as inferior or superior is impossible, for the reason that each, while perfectly fulfilling its own particular destiny, is quite different from all the others, and such natural preference as may be felt by this or that listener for either must be considered as purely personal. The present writer may, perhaps, be allowed to confess that, with all joy in the dainty second and the magnificent third and fourth--emphatically the fourth--neither appeals to her quite so strongly as the first. There is here a quality of youth in the intensity of the soaring imagination that seems to search the universe, which, presented as it is with the wealth of resource that was at the command of the mature composer, could not by its nature be other than unique. The presence of this very quality may be the reason why the first symphony suffers even more lamentably than its companions from the dull, cold, cautious, 'classical' rendering which Brahms' orchestral works receive at the hands of some conductors, who seem unable to realize that a composer who founds his works on certain definite and traditional principles of structure does not thereby change his nature, or in any degree renounce the free exercise of his poetic gifts. Perhaps the present is as good an opportunity as may occur for passing mention of a newspaper episode of the eighties, which was much talked of for a few years, but which, though it may have caused Brahms annoyance, could not possibly at this period of his career have had any more serious consequence so far as he was concerned. Hugo Wolf, in 1884 a young aspirant to fame, seeking recognition but finding none, poor, gifted, disappointed, weak in health, highly nervous, without influential friends, accepted an opportunity of increasing his miserably small means of subsistence by becoming the musical critic of the _Salon Blatt_, a weekly society paper of Vienna, and soon made for himself an unenviable notoriety by his persistent attacks upon Brahms' compositions. The affair would not now demand mention in a biography of our master if it were not that the posthumous recognition afforded to Wolf's art gives some interest, though not of an agreeable nature, to this association of his name with that of Brahms. For the benefit of those readers who may wish to study the matter further, it may be added that Wolf's criticisms have been republished since his death. For ourselves, having done what was, perhaps, incumbent on us by referring to the matter, we shall adopt what we believe would have been Brahms' desire, by allowing it, so far as these pages are concerned, to follow others of the kind to oblivion.