She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of it startles you at first--it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me. It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don't know whether you are listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a divine thing. In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all the violin throbs its deep accompaniment. I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception the poets I know don't care for music essentially; though why a mind keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet's opportunity here: "the boom and squeal," and out of it music that is as sacred as an organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song! However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician's special quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: "her full blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow, glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her presentations." The verdict of a "a veritable artist soul" appeared to be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and simplicity: "Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her." Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful, but metrically inadequate, translation: Thou standst before us, a picture of wondrous charm; The little violin thou holdst, in tenderess, Half maidenly, half like a child in dress Hast soared away from Heaven's angel-farm Toward where thy large mild eye is dreaming. And he ended it with these lines: