of Guinevere; but MacDowell has given no indication of this fact in
his score, and only occasionally does the information find its way
into the programme-books. Yet in his own copy of the score he wrote a
complete and detailed key to the significance of the music at every
point. Such are the ways of the musical realist!

He was, in an extraordinarily complete sense, a celebrant of the
natural world. His imagination was enslaved by the miraculous pageant
of the visible earth, and he sought tirelessly to transfix some moment
of its wonder or its splendour or its terror in permanent images of
tone. The melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of
quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or
the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty
of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged
him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and
sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland
places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt
spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in its voicing of that
indefinable and evanescent sense of association which is evoked by
certain aspects, certain phases, of the outer world--that sudden
emotion of things past and irrecoverable which may cling about a field
at sunset, or a quiet street at dusk, or a sudden intimation of spring
in the scent of lilacs.

But although such themes as he loved to dwell upon in his celebration
of the magic of the natural world were very precious to his
imagination, the human spectacle held for him, from the first, an
emotion scarcely less swift and abundant. His scope is comprehensive:
he can voice the archest gaiety, a naive and charming humour, as in
the "Marionettes" and in the songs "From an Old Garden"; there is