The emotional disturbance of his strange adventure with Dorothy Powys had thrown him into an orgy of verse-making which produced such poor results that he was forced to turn to the love-poetry of the Elizabethans and of Shelley, which he embroidered with musical settings that gave him more satisfaction. These attempts at song-writing pleased him for a time; but it was not until he became friendly with Boyce that he began to realise what music was. Not only were the Boyces the possessors of a grand-piano on which his homely tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his friend’s father, the poet, was intimately acquainted with the best of modern music. Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German song-writers from Schubert and Schumann to Hugo Wolf, and laid the foundations of a feverish devotion to Wagner, whom the friends approached perforce by way of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, the two operas that the Moody Manners company ventured to present to provincial audiences. Edwin discovered that North Bromwich, a city that takes its music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the triennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep again, supported—or rather failed to support—a society for the performance of orchestral music. The concerts were held fortnightly in the town-hall, the windows of which had now been repaired, and to these concerts Edwin and his friend went together, always sitting in the same two seats under the gallery at the back of the hall. In this way they heard a great deal of good music: the nine symphonies of Beethoven, with the Leeds Choir in the last: the usual orchestral extracts from the Ring, the Meistersingers Overture, and the Siegfried Idyll: the fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies of Tschaikovski: the tone-poems of Strauss, and a small sprinkling of modern French music. These were ambrosial nights to which they both looked forward, and Martin, who had developed an unexpected inclination for music, sometimes went with them.