This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
468
MUSICAL CHRONICLE

of the last century into the more modern Arcadia of the Ladies' Home Journal, and its corner drug-stores in whose windows repose majestically enormous brass-crowned glass vases apparently filled with liquids of chemical violet and blue. It contains one plaster-fresh hotel wherein a senatorial coloured head-waiter addresses guests Bossuet-like with "We beg you sincerely to bear with us" when the restaurant service breaks down beneath the matutinal demands of famished Bach enthusiasts, and it takes the eggs an hour and a quarter to fry. It contains also several smaller older hotels where leather arm-chairs and attendant cuspidors stand before the long plate window giving on the thoroughfare, and where waitresses of virginal demeanour recruited from the ranks of the lower middle classes serve vegetables in birds' bath-tubs. Much of the character of what is outside the walls of the Packard Memorial Church is within it, too. The apse contains six painted windows which, while pretending to represent three Old Testamentary and three New Testamentary worthies, are really exquisitely expressive of the feeble and sour representations of the spiritual forces made by the latter generations who have inhabited the environs. One could easily perceive the sons in that picture of paternal authority. Moses and Elias, if these indeed are they, look exactly like doddering old fatherly gentlemen whom the young ambitious could perfectly afford to neglect; while King David smiting his harp looks like a sporty banker with whiskers, turned a bit aesthetic; a sort of Victorian Anthology Stedman in oriental silks; and wears his light-coloured biretta at a raffish angle. The New Testamentary personages, on the other hand, look like nobody at all.

No, it is an individual has made flourish this great grave beauty a few hundreds of yards away from the mills of the Bethlehemn Steel Company! In a little nervy man, half schoolmasterish, half poetical; in two lengthy hands like violins that seem to reason and to coax music from out the throats of an hundred odd work-people of a Pennsylvania industrial town; in the spectacled face which registers every nuance of a most subtle and complex and severe art; in a small slender body suffused entirely with the excitement of Bach's music, there resides the lever which has brought Bach and Bethlehem together, and made a temple-service of musical art for the United States. It is said that twenty years ago Dr Wolle went to Germany and heard Bach, and returned full of the will to organize the com-