of vision, and perfection of accomplishment. The question of bulk,
length, size, has quite as much pertinence in one case as in the
other. In his work in this sort, MacDowell is often as one who, having
fallen, through the ignominies of daily life, among the barren
makeshifts of reality, "remembers the enchanted valleys." It is
touched at times with the deep and wistful tenderness, the primæval
nostalgia, which is never very distant from the mood of his writing,
and in which, again, one is tempted to trace the essential Celt. It is
this close kinship with the secret presences of the natural world,
this intimate responsiveness to elemental moods, this quick
sensitiveness to the aroma and the magic of places, that sets him
recognisably apart.

If in the "Indian" suite MacDowell disclosed the full maturity of his
powers of imaginative and structural design, it is in the "Woodland
Sketches" (op. 51) that his speech, freed from such incumbrances as
were imposed upon it by his deliberate adoption of an exotic idiom,
assumes for the first time some of its most engaging and distinctive
characteristics. Consider, for example, number eight of the group, "A
Deserted Farm." Here is the quintessence of his style in one of its
most frequent aspects. The manner has a curious simplicity, yet it
would be difficult to say in what, precisely, the simplicity consists;
it has striking individuality,--yet the particular trait in which it
resides is not easily determined. The simplicity is certainly not of
the harmonic plan, nor of the melodic outline, which are subtly yet
frankly conceived; and the individuality does not lie in any
eccentricity or determined novelty of effect. Both the flavour of
simplicity and of personality are, one concludes, more a spiritual
than an anatomical possession of the music. Its quality is as
intangible and pervasive as that dim magic of "unremembering