nith.
He saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional
depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all
time, for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the
pictorial canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the
times. It was done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the
end, or philosopher enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was
born with the intuition to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly
from every aspect.

"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of
the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and
arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad
form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so
completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated
and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when
compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra
figurine beside a Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in
its scope as the statue is in the greater.

"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"

All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am
trying in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth.
Perhaps I should speak only of that which is known directly to myself.
It costs me nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to
incorporate it as an essential part of the record as far as it relates
to the most famous and in his day the most beloved of American song
writers.

Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated
together on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through
Georgia, when the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a
dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune."

And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the
same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.

Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear
the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American
friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking
forth with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was
mightily pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a
potpourri of Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and
the group of us stood up and sang the chorus.

I d