here is one fact which describes minutely my veneration
for Stevens's work at its best, perhaps the fullest; whereby I mean
that inspection of his intellectual labour has always restored to me
the time so wisely occupied in regarding it, proving that there is
goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral
things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic
inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest
embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering,
barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform
tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but
sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end. One
misses the heated passion of Watts's best pictures, which flow through
the ordered channel of recognisable expression and make one adore
them as poetry. But there, of a truth, invidious comparison ends,
and reticence shall ever guard the space that intervenes betwixt the
grounds sacred to the exposition of the embodiment of these master
lights.

_MUSIC._

_From the_ BATH CHRONICLE, _January 30th,_ 1902.

MEDITATION ON BERTHOLD TOURS' EVENING SERVICE IN "D."

_To the Editor of the Bath Chronicle._

Sir,--Personally it occurs to me that in a public sense it may not
appear to be out of due place nor uninstructive to the readers of the
pages of the "Bath Chronicle," if they were allowed to pursue quietly
the "meditation" which I have thought fit, with, some amount of
feasible excuse, to set in fair order, concerning the apotheosis of
an evening service in musical form, from the versatile pen of Mr.
Berthold Tours, in the key of D, which, with no inconsiderable _eclat_
was in the sequence of events, produced at St. Raphael's Church,
Bristol, on Sunday, the 12th inst. A companion to the graceful evening
service or setting of the appointed Canticles in F major, which be
it observed, is the most popular, and from a purely suitable point of
view, most successful of modern evening services, it marks a phase
of expression, at once ethereal and predilectious. Produced at a
more mature period, and under certainly different circumstances, it
confirms, honours indeed, the fecundity of the age of its inception,
namely, the era of British AEstheticism.

Commenting upon its attributes discursively, it was at the period of
its original initiation in London my privilege to be present; nor
must I omit to graphically a