symbols. It deals in a truth that is no less authentic because it is
conveyed in terms of a beauty that may often be in the last degree
incalculable and aërial.

It is to its persistent embodiment of this valid spirit of romance
that MacDowell's work owes its final and particular distinction. I
know of no composer who has displayed a like sensitiveness to the
finer stuff of romance. He has chosen more than occasionally to
employ, in the accomplishment of his purposes, what seems at first to
be precisely the magical apparatus so necessary to the older
Romanticism. Dryads and elves are his intimate companions, and he
dwells at times under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; but for
him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but
the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the
transfiguring mirror of his music, the moods and events of the natural
world, and of the drama that plays incessantly in the hearts of men,
are vivified into shapes and designs of irresistible beauty and
appeal. He is of those quickened ministers of beauty who attest for us
the reality of that changeless and timeless loveliness which the
visible world of the senses and the invisible world of the imagination
are ceaselessly revealing to the simple of heart, the dream-filled,
and the unwise.

MacDowell presents throughout the entire body of his work the
noteworthy spectacle of a radical without extravagance, a musician at
once in accord with, and detached from, the dominant artistic
movement of his day. The observation is more a definition than an
encomium. He is a radical in that, to his sense, music is nothing if
not articulate. Wagner's luminous phrase, "the fertilisation of music
by poetry," would have implied for him no mere æsthetic abstraction,