efinite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in
music," says Eduard Hanslick in his _Beautiful in Music_. Now, you
composers who make symphonic poems, why don't you realize that on its
merits as a musical composition, its theme, its form, its treatment,
that your work will endure, and not on account of its fidelity to your
explanatory program?

For example, if I were a very talented young composer--which I am
not--and had mastered the tools of my trade--knew everything from a song
to a symphony, and my instrumentation covered the whole gamut of the
orchestral pigment.... Well, one night as I tossed wearily on my bed--it
was a fine night in spring, the moon rounded and lustrous and silvering
the lake below my window--suddenly my musical imagination began to work.

I had just been reading, and for the thousandth time, Browning's _Childe
Roland_, with its sinister coloring and spiritual suggestions. Yet it
had never before struck me as a subject suitable for musical treatment.
But the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow flavor, had
set my brain in a ferment. A huge fantastic shadow threw a jagged black
figure on the lake. Presto, it was done, and with a mental snap that
almost blinded me.

I had my theme. It will be the first theme in my new symphonic poem,
_Childe Roland_. It will be in the key of B minor, which is to be
emblematic of the dauntless knight who to "the dark tower came,"
unfettered by obstacles, physical or spiritual.

O, how my brain seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men
who the moment they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end.
_Childe Roland_ kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless
horn" call and saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I felt it to be
good; to me it was Browning's Knight personified. I could hear its
underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, without
one note of gladness.

The theme I treated in such a rhythmical fashion as to impart to it
exceeding vitality, and I announced it with the English horn, with a
curious rhythmic background by the tympani; the strings in division
played tremolando and the bass staccato and muted. This may not be clear
to you; it is not very clear to me, but at the time it all seemed very
wonderful. I finished the work after nine months of agony, of revision,
of pruning, clipping, cutting, hawking it about for my friends'
inspection and getting laughed at, admired and