can be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply impassioned, with a
sharpness of emotion that is beyond denial. In such songs as
"Deserted" (op. 9); "Menie" (op. 34); "The Robin Sings in the Apple
Tree," "The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees" (op. 47); "The Swan
Bent Low to the Lily," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" (op. 56);
"Constancy" (op. 58); "Fair Springtide" (op. 60); in "Lancelot and
Elaine"; in "Told at Sunset," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in "An Old
Love Story," from "Fireside Tales": in this music the emotion is the
distinctive emotion of sex; but it is the sexual emotion known to
Burns rather than to Rossetti, to Schubert rather than to Wagner.

He had the rapt and transfiguring imagination, in the presence of
nature, which is the special possession of the Celt. Yet he was more
than a mere landscape painter. The human drama was for him a
continually moving spectacle; he was most sensitively attuned to its
tragedy and its comedy,--he was never more potent, more influential,
indeed, than in celebrating its events. He is at the summit of his
powers, for example, in the superb pageant of heroic grief and equally
heroic love which is comprised within the four movements of the
"Keltic" sonata, and in the piercing sadness and the transporting
tenderness of the "Dirge" in the "Indian" suite.

In its general aspect his later music is not German, or French, or
Italian--its spiritual antecedents are Northern, both Celtic and
Scandinavian. MacDowell had not the Promethean imagination, the
magniloquent passion, that are Strauss's; his art is far less
elaborate and subtle than that of such typical moderns as Debussy and
d'Indy. But it has an order of beauty that is not theirs, an order of
eloquence that is not theirs, a kind of poetry whose secrets they do
not know; and there speaks through it and out of it an individuality