degree, the faculty of uttering whatever revelation of its loveliness
or majesty has been vouchsafed. At once, in studying these pieces, one
observes a wide departure in method and accomplishment from the style
of the "Wald-Idyllen." In those, it seemed, the poet had somehow
failed to compose "with his eye on the object": the vision lacked
steadiness, lacked penetration--or it may be that the vision was
present, but not the power of notation. In the Goethe paraphrases, on
the other hand, we are given, in a measure, the sense of the thing
perceived; I say "in a measure," for his power of acute and
sympathetic observation and of eloquent transmutation had not yet come
to its highest pitch. Of the six "Idyls," three--"In the Woods,"
"Siesta," and "To the Moonlight"--are memorable, though uneven; and of
these the third, after Goethe's "An den Mond," adumbrates faintly
MacDowell's riper manner. The "Silver Clouds," "Flute Idyl,"[11] and
"Blue Bell" are decidedly less characteristic.

[11] The poems which suggested this and the preceding piece were used
again by MacDowell in two of the most admirable of the "Eight Songs,"
op. 47.

His third orchestral work, the symphonic poem "Lamia," is based upon
the fantastic (and what Mr. Howells would call unconscionably
"romanticistic") poem of Keats. Begun during his last year in
Wiesbaden (1888), and completed the following winter in Boston, it
stands, in the order of MacDowell's orchestral pieces, between
"Lancelot and Elaine" and the two "fragments" after the "Song of
Roland." On a fly-leaf of the score MacDowell has written this
glossary of the story as told by Keats:

"Lamia, an enchantress in the form of a serpent, loves Lycius, a