and the tone are ideally mated. Yet even in others of his songs in
which they do not so invariably correspond, one must acknowledge
gladly the beauty and freshness of the music itself: such music as he
has given us in "Constancy" (op. 58), in "As the Gloaming Shadows
Creep" (op. 56), in "Fair Springtide"--which represent his ripest
utterances as a song writer. If he is not, in this particular form,
quite at his happiest, he is among the foremost of those who have kept
alive in the modern tradition the conception of the song as a medium
of lyric utterance no less than of precise dramatic signification.

[16] No. VII. of the "Eight Songs," op. 47.

[17] Op. 58, No. II.




CHAPTER VIII

SUMMARY


To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in American music it is
necessary to remember that twenty-five years ago, when he sent from
Germany, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, the earliest
outgivings of his talent, our native musical art was still little
more than a pallid reproduction of European models. MacDowell did
not at that time, of course, give positive evidence of the vitality
and the rarity of his gifts; yet there was, even in his early
music,--undeniably immature though it was, and modelled after easily