Lancelot's downfall, his return to the court and the interview with
Guinevere, the apparition of the funeral barge, and the soliloquy of
Lancelot by the river bank. The work is dramatically conceived. There
are passages of impressive tenderness,--as in the incident of the
approaching barge; of climactic force,--as in the passage portraying
the casting away of the trophies; and there are admirable details of
workmanship. The scoring is full and adroit, though not very
elaborate. As always with him, the instrumental texture is richly
woven, although his utilisation of the possibilities of the orchestra
is far from exhaustive. One misses, for example, the colouring of
available harp effects, for which he appeared to have a distaste,
since the instrument is not required in any of his orchestral works.
That he was not satisfied with the scoring of the work is known. He
remarked to Mr. Philip Hale that it was "too full of horns"; and in
his own copy of the score, which I possess, he has made in pencil
numerous changes in the instrumentation, much to its improvement; he
has, for instance, in accord with his expressed feeling, reduced the
prominence of the horns, allotting their parts, in certain important
instances, to the wood-wind, trombones, or trumpets.

The "Six Idyls after Goethe," for piano (op. 28), are noteworthy as
foreshadowing the candid impressionism which was to have its finest
issue in the "Woodland Sketches," "Sea Pieces," and "New England
Idyls." The Goethe paraphrases, although they have only a tithe of the
graphic nearness and felicity of the later pieces, are yet fairly
successful in their attempt to find a musical correspondence for
certain definitely stated concepts and ideas--a partial fulfilment of
the method implied in the earlier "Wald-Idyllen." He presents
himself here as one who has yielded his imagination to an intimate
contemplation of the natural world, and who already has, in some