name into general notice. From Baltimore, January 8, 1876, he writes to his wife:

Well then: God be praised that giveth us the victory. I have late this afternoon finished my third India paper, which was a great labor and strain; and to-night we have played a divine concert of Scandinavian music, whereof I inclose thee the programme; and my heart is so full of this heavenly melody that I cannot find me any rest till I have in some wise enlarged me.

Moreover I have a charming piece of news which—although thou art not yet to communicate it to any one except Clifford-I cannot keep from thee. The opening ceremonies of the Centennial Exhibition will be very grand; and among other things there are to be sung by a full chorus (and played by the orchestra, under Thomas's direction) a hymn and a cantata. Gen. Hawley, President of the Centennial Commission, has written inviting me to write the latter (I mean the poem; Dudley Buck, of New York, is to write the music). Bayard Taylor is to write the hymn. This is very pleasing to me; for I am chosen as representative of our dear South; and the matter puts my

name by the side of very delightful and honorable ones, besides bringing me in contact with many people I would desire to know.

Mr. Buck has written me that he wants the poem by January 15, which as I have not yet had the least time for it, gives me just seven days to write it in. I would much rather have had seven months; God is great. Remember, thou and Cliff, that this is not yet to be spoken of at all.

but

In a letter to Mr. Peacock, written the 18th, he inclosed the first draft of the cantata, saying: "Necessarily I had to think out the musical conception as well as the poem, and I have briefly indicated these along the margin of each movement. I have tried to make the whole as simple and as candid as a melody of Beethoven's; at the same time expressing the largest ideas possible, and expressing them in such a way as could not be offensive to any modern soul. I particularly hope you will like the Angel's song, where I have endeavored to convey,

in one line each, the philosophies of Art, of Science, of Power, of Government, of Faith, and of Social Life. Of course I shall not expect that this will instantly appeal to tastes peppered and salted by Swinburne and that ilk; but one cannot forget Beethoven, and somehow all my inspirations come in these large and artless forms, in simple Saxon words, in unpretentious and purely intellectual conceptions; while nevertheless I felt, all through, the necessity of making a genuine song, and not a rhymed set of good adages, out of it. I adopted the trochees of the first movement because they compel a measured, sober, and meditative movement of the mind; and because, too, they are not the genius of our language. When the trochees cease and the land emerges as a distinct unity, then I fall into our native iambics." Of Mr. Buck he writes: "We have gotten on together with perfect harmony during

the process of fitting together the words and the music, which has been wholly accomplished by letter."

The sky became somewhat brighter now; he was better paid for his work, receiving three hundred dollars for the "Psalm of the West," and his heart was gladdened by tokens of love and sympathy at home. From Macon he writes, April 27, 1876: "The Southern people make a great deal more of my appointment to write the cantata poem than I had ever expected, and it really seems to be regarded by them as one of the most substantial tokens of reconciliation yet evinced by that vague tertium quid which they are accustomed to represent to themselves under the general term of the North.' I am astonished, too, to find what a hold 'Corn' has taken upon all classes. Expressions come to me in great number from men whom I never supposed accessible

by any poetry whatever; and these recognitions arrive hand in hand with those from persons of the highest culture. The Tribune notice of the cantata has been copied by a great many Southern papers, and I think it materially assisted in starting the poem off properly; though the people here are so enthusiastic in my favor at present that they are quite prepared to accept blindly anything that comes from me. Of course I understand all this; and any success seems cheap which depends so thoroughly on local pride as does my present position with the South; yet in view of the long and bitter struggle which I must make up my mind to wage in carrying out these extensions of poetic forms about which all my thoughts now begin to converge, it is pleasant to find that I have at least the nucleus of an audience which will be willing to receive me upon the plane of mere blind faith until time shall have giv