The music is drenched in salt-spray, wind-swept, exhilarating.

There are pages in it through which rings the thunderous laughter of the sea in its mood of cosmic and terrifying elation, and there are pages through which drift sun-painted mists--mists that both conceal and disclose enchanted vistas and apparitions.

There is an exhilaration even in his titles (which he has supplemented with mottos): as "To the Sea," "From a Wandering Iceberg," "Starlight," "From the Depths," "In Mid-Ocean." I make no concealment of my unqualified admiration for these pieces: with the sonatas, the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite, and certain of the "Woodland Sketches," they record, I think, his high-water mark.

He has carried them through with superb gusto, with unwearying imaginative fervour.

In "To the Sea," "From the Depths," and "In Mid-Ocean," it is the sea of Whitman's magnificent apostrophe that he celebrates--the sea of "brooding scowl and murk," of "unloosed hurricanes," speaking, imperiously, "with husky-haughty lips"; while elsewhere, as in the "Wandering Iceberg" and "Nautilus" studies, the pervading tone is of Swinburne's "deep divine dark dayshine of the sea." "Starlight" is of a brooding and solemn tenderness.