n!
Pauses in heaven!
And they say the starry choir
And the other listening things,
That Israfel's fire is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings
Of those unusual strings.

By permission.

FRAGMENT OF "ISRAFEL," BY EDGAR S. KELLEY.]

Kelley has two unpublished songs that show him at his best, both
settings of verse by Poe,--"Eldorado," which vividly develops the
persistence of the knight, and "Israfel." This latter poem, as you
know, concerns the angel "whose heart-strings are a lute." After a
rhapsody upon the cosmic spell of the angel's singing, Poe, with a
brave defiance, flings an implied challenge to him. The verse marks
one of the highest reaches of a genius honored abroad as a world-great
lyrist. It is, perhaps, praise enough, then, to say that Kelley's
music flags in no wise behind the divine progress of the words. The
lute idea dictates an arpeggiated accompaniment, whose harmonic beauty
and courage is beyond description and beyond the grasp of the mind at
the first hearing. The bravery of the climax follows the weird and
opiate harmonies of the middle part with tremendous effect. The song
is, in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the
very greatest lyrics in the world's music.

_Harvey Worthington Loomis._

[Illustration: HARVEY WORTHINGTON LOOMIS.]

[Illustration: Autograph of Harvey Worthington Loomis]

In the band of pupils that gathered to the standard of the invader,
Antonin Dvorak, when, in 1892, he came over here from Macedonia to
help us, some of the future's best composers will probably be found.

Of this band was Harvey Worthington Loomis, who won a three years'
scholarship in Doctor Dvorak's composition class at the National
Conservatory, by submitting an excellent, but rather uncharacteristic,
setting of Eichendorff's "Fruehlingsnacht." Loomis evidently won
Doctor Dvorak's confidence, for among the tasks imposed on him was a
piano concerto to be built on the lines of so elaborate a model as
Rubinstein's in D minor. When Loomis' first sketches showed an
elaboration even beyond the complex pattern, Dvorak still advised him
to go on. To any one that knows the ways of harmony teachers this will
mean much.

Loomis (who was born in Brooklyn, February 5, 1865, and is now a
resident of New York) pursued studies in harmony and piano in a
desultory way until he entered Doctor Dvor