re not called to
_Wander-Jahre_, but are born with sails set and seas charted. Already
the baby of four little years was a musician, and as choir-boy and
violinist he walked unhesitatingly and surely to his life work. He was
graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in 1894, and
married soon after the daughter of one of his professors. Then his life
began, and whatever it lacked of physical adventure in the conventional
round of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almost
tempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neither
meat nor drink,--it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowed
within him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of
mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs,
pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidental
music, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers.
Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin things made to meet
sudden popularity. Rather they were the flaming bits that must be said
and sung,--that could not wait the slower birth of years, so hurried to
the world as though their young creator knew that God gave him but a
day. His whole active life was scarcely more than a decade and a half,
and yet in that time, without wealth, friends, or influence, in the face
of perhaps the most critical and skeptical and least imaginative
civilization of the modern world, he wrote his name so high as a
creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.

And this was but one side of the man. On the other was the
sweet-tempered, sympathetic comrade, always willing to help, never
knowing how to refuse, generous with every nerve and fiber of his being.
Think of a young musician, father of a family, who at the time of his
death held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music,
Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the Handel
Choral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of the
Guildhall School of Music, where he had charge of the choral choir, the
orchestra, and the opera. He was repeatedly the leader of music
festivals all over Great Britain and a judge of contests. And with all
this his house was open in cheering hospitality to friends and his hand
ever ready with sympathy and help.

When such a man dies, it must bring pause to a reasoning world. We may
call his death-sickness pneumonia, but we all know that it was sh