l amang 'em takin'
notes." A single hobgoblin bassoon croaks ludicrously away,
the pixies darkle and flirt and dance their hearts out of
them.

The Romance is in rondo form with love-lorn iteration of
themes and intermezzo, and deftest broidery, the whole
ending, after a graceful Recollection, in a bliss of harmony.

The Finale is a halleluiah. It is on the sonata formula,
without introduction (the second subject being not in the
dominant of A major, but in C major, that chaste, frank key
which one of the popes strangely dubbed "lascivious"). The
elaboration is frenetic with strife, but the reprise is a
many-hued rainbow after storm, and the coda in A major
(ending a symphony begun in A minor) is swift with delight.

This symphony has been played much, but not half enough. It should
resist the weariness of time as immortally as Fletcher's play, "The
Two Noble Kinsmen" (in which Shakespeare's hand is glorious), for it
is, to quote that drama, "fresher than May, sweeter than her gold
buttons on the bough, or all th'enamell'd knacks o' the mead or
garden."

John Knowles Paine is a name that has been held in long and high
honor among American composers. He was about the earliest of native
writers to convince foreign musicians that some good could come out of
Nazareth.

He was born in Portland, Me., January 9, 1839. He studied music first
under a local teacher, Kotzschmar, making his debut as organist at the
age of eighteen. A year later he was in Berlin, where for three years
he studied the organ, composition, instrumentation, and singing under
Haupt, Wieprecht, and others. He gave several organ concerts in
Germany, and made a tour in 1865-1866. In February, 1867, his "Mass"
was given at the Berlin Singakademie, Paine conducting. Then he came
back to the States, and in 1872 was appointed to an instructorship of
music at Harvard, whence he was promoted in 1876 to a full
professorship, a chair created for him and occupied by him ever since
with distinguished success.

His first symphony was brought out by Theodore Thomas in 1876. This
and his other orchestral works have been frequently performed at
various places in this country and abroad.

His only oratorio, "St. Peter," was first produced at Portland in
1873, and in Boston a year later. It is a work of great power and much
dramatic strength. Upton, in his valuable work, "Standard Oratorios,"
calls it "from the