Stars comes afterward, nearly at the end. But I think, as March did, that
Paula's instinct was sound in using the unearthly Schubert-like beauty of
the Burial of the Stars as a prelude to the purely human passion of the
love song.

It is, I suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English
language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered
swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic
idiom as though they had been born under the same star.

The result is one of those happy marriages so rare as to be almost
unique, in which the emotional power of a great song is enhanced by its
musical setting, and where, conversely, a great piece of lyric music
gains rather than loses by its words.

March did not use the whole poem. His setting begins on the line "Low
hangs the moon," and ends with the "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!"
Why he elected not to go on with it, I don't know. Possibly, because his
own impulse was spent before Whitman's; possibly, because he did not wish
to impose the darker melancholy of the latter stanzas upon the clear
ecstasy of that last call.

It lost something, of course, from the inadequacy of the piano
transcription, for it was conceived and written orchestrally. Paula, too,
has given finer performances of it;--indeed, she sang it better a little
later that same evening. But spurred as she was by the knowledge that the
composer was listening to it and by her determination to win a victory
for it, she flung herself into it with all the power and passion she had.

I doubt whether any other auditor ever is more completely overwhelmed