While many of the songs which wore popular in the end of last century have completely vanished from concert platform and from drawing-room, there are several by Maud Valerie White which seem destined to keep their hold on the affections of listeners and singers. And their popularity is in every way worthily earned. They not only choose poetry which is usually far above the standard of the ordinary verse which composers sot to music, but they treat it with a poet's regard not only for its beauty of sound, but for its meaning. Her settings of lyrics by Herrick and Shelley, for instance, are admirably adapted, in one case to the old-fashioned turns of thought and phrase, and in the other to the passionate sentiment of the words. 'My soul is an enchanted boat,' to name only one instance, is a really poetic piece of music.
A former holder of the Mendelssohn's scholarship of the Royal Academy of Music, Miss White is equally at home in French and in German poetry, as many of her settings of Heine, Victor Hugo, and Schiller amply testify. And she has composed in larger forms, too, although it is mainly by her songs that she has won so secure a place in the music of our time.