disparity in favor of literature. It is not invidious to say that in architecture and perhaps in painting we have gone further than in music. But, however an even-handed Justice might mete out rewards in the individual arts, American Literature and American Music have been interestingly correlated, and it is this correlation that I shall discuss. I choose the native compositions in the larger musical forms-operas, oratorios, symphonic poems, or orchestral fantasies-rather than songs, which provide the most obvious use of music and words together. I do this because the larger forms illustrate my point better, because songs are too numerous, and because, as Edward MacDowell once said, the value of a poem as a suggestion for instrumental music is greater than its value as the text for a song, wherein syllables are generally distorted. MacDowell felt that for him a poem of four words might contain enough suggestion for four pages of music. He never found completely satisfying the ability of music to match the syllables and inflections of a poem, notwithstanding the fact that his own songs show that he possessed a rare ability to catch the spirit and mood of the chosen verses-often, indeed, verses of his own making. Many of our composers have received genuine inspiration and creative impulse from the poems and prose works of our American writers as libretti or programs for their operas, oratorios, or orchestral poems. The point that I am making in this study is not how much or how little of a given text is told clearly as connected narrative in the musical translation. It is rather that these works of literature have inspired composers to express in tones all or part of the actual story, the mood only of the story, or possibly rather the mood in which the literary work left the composer. Several questions concerning this translation of literature into