Slowly we are borne to the less exalted pitch of the first festive march, and here follows, as at first, the expressive melody where each hearer may find his own shade of sadness.  It does seem to reach a true passion of regret, with poignant sweet sighs.

At length the sadness is overcome and there is a new animation as separate voices enter in fugal manner in the line of the march.  Now the festive tune holds sway in lower pace in the basses; but then rings on high in answer—­the wistful melody again and again, in doubled and twice redoubled pace.

When we hear the penseroso melody once more at the end, we may feel with the poet a state of resigned cheer.

A remarkable work that shows the influence of modern French harmony rather than its actual traits, is a SYMPHONY BY GUSTAV STRUBE.[A] It is difficult to resist the sense of a strain for bizarre harmony, of a touch of preciosity.  The real business of these harmonies is for incidental pranks, with an after-touch that confesses the jest, or softens it to a lyric utterance.  It cannot be denied that the moving moments in this work come precisely in the release of the strain of dissonance, as in the returning melody of the Adagio.  Only we may feel we have been waiting too long.  The desert was perhaps too long for the oasis. Est modus in rebus:  the poet seems niggardly with his melody; he may weary us with too long waiting, with too little staying comfort.  He does not escape the modern way of symbolic, infinitesimal melody, so small that it must, of course, reappear.  It is a little like the wonderful arguments from ciphers hidden in poetry.

[Footnote A:  Of Boston,—­born in Germany in 1867.]

It cannot he denied that the smallness of phrase does suggest a smallness of idea.  The plan of magic motive will not hold ad infinitesimum.  As the turn of the triplet, in the first movement, twists into a semblance of the Allegro theme, we feel like wondering with the old Philistine: 

    ...  “How all this difference can be
    ’Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee!”

But there is the redeeming vein of lyric melody with a bold fantasy of mischievous humor and a true climax of a clear poetic design.  One reason seems sometimes alone to justify this new license, this new French revolution:  the deliverance from a stupid slavery of rules,—­if we would only get the spirit of them without the inadequate letter.  Better, of course, the rules than a fatal chaos.  But there is here in the bold flight of these harmonies, soaring as though on some hidden straight path, a truly Promethean utterance.

It is significant, in the problem of future music, that of the symphonies based upon recent French ideas, the most subtly conceived and designed should have been written in America.

I.—­In pale tint of harmony sways the impersonal phrase that begins with a descending tone.  We may