sustains his art upon a noteworthy level of fineness and strength.

The range of his expressional gamut is striking. One is at a loss to
say whether he is happier in emotional moments of weighty
significance,--as in many pages of the sonatas and some of the "Sea
Pieces,"--or in such cameo-like performances as the "Woodland
Sketches," certain of the "Marionettes,"[9] and the exquisite song
group, "From an Old Garden," in which he attains an order of delicate
eloquence difficult to associate with the mind which shaped the heroic
ardours of the "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas. His capacity for forceful
utterance is remarkable. Only in certain pages of Strauss is there
anything in contemporary music which compares, for superb virility,
dynamic power, and sweep of line, with the opening of the "Keltic"
sonata. He has, moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expression.
Time and again he astonishes by his ability to charge a composition of
the briefest span with an emotional or dramatic content of large and
far-reaching significance. His "To the Sea,"[10] for example, is but
thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a
tone-picture which for breadth of conception and concentrated
splendour of effect is paralleled in the contemporary literature of
the piano only by himself. Consider, also, the "Epilogue" in the
revised version of the "Marionettes." The piece comprises only a score
of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a
world of philosophical meditation: here is reflected the mood of one
who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life,
in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a
controlling destiny than are the figures of his puppet microcosm.

[9] The revised version, published in 1901, is referred to. The
original edition, which appeared in 1888, is decidedly inferior.