, then faintest echoes of higher voices.

A new figure now dances a joyous measure to the tinkling of harp and the
sparkling strokes of high

[Music: (Harp in higher 8ve.)
(Clarinet with chord of horns)
(Violas)]

cymbals and long blown tone of horns. The very essence it is of fairy
life. And so the joy is not unmixed with just a touch of awe. Amidst the
whole tintinnabulation is a soft resonant echo of horns below, like an
image in a lake. The air hangs heavy with dim romance until the sudden
return to first fairy verse in sounds almost human. Once more come the
frightening pauses.

The end is in a great crash of sweet sound--a glad awakening to day and
to reality.

CHAPTER IV

A SYMPHONY TO DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA"

_FOR ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS OF SOPRANOS AND ALTOS_

The "Divina Commedia" may be said in a broad view to belong to the great
design by which Christian teaching was brought into relation with
earlier pagan lore. The subject commands all the interest of the epics
of Virgil and of Milton. It must be called the greatest Christian poem
of all times, and the breadth of its appeal and of its art specially
attest the age in which it was written, when classic pagan poetry broke
upon the world like a great treasure-trove.

The subject was an ideal one in Dante's time,--a theme convincing and
contenting to all the world, and, besides, akin to the essence of pagan
poetry. The poet was needed to celebrate all the phases of its meaning
and beauty. This is true of all flashes of evolutionary truth. As in the
ancient epics, an idea once real to the world may be enshrined in a
design of immortal art.

To-day we are perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a
contemplation. The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those
who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully
apprehended. And so the Liszt symphony of the nineteenth century is not
a complete reflection of the Dante poem of the fourteenth. It becomes
for the devout believer almost a kind of church-liturgy,--a Mass by the
Abbe Liszt.

Rare qualities there undoubtedly are in the music: a reality of passion;
a certain simplicity of plan; the sensuous beauty of melodic and
harmonic touches. But a greatness in the whole musical expression that
may approach the grandeur of the poem, could only come in a suggestion
of symbolic truth; and here the composer seems to fail by a too close
clinging to ecclesiast