conceived as an illustration to Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle." The
three other numbers of this opus, "The Brook," "Moonshine," and
"Winter," one can praise only in measured terms--although "Winter,"
which attempts a representation of the "widow bird" and frozen
landscape of Shelley's lyric, has some measures that dwell
persistently in the memory: but "The Eagle" is a superb achievement.
Its deliberate purpose is to realise in tone the imagery and
atmosphere of Tennyson's lines--an object which it accomplishes with
triumphant completeness. As a feat of sheer tone-painting one recalls
few things, of a similar scope and purpose, that surpass it in
fitness, concision, and felicity. It displays a power of imaginative
transmutation hitherto undisclosed in MacDowell's writing. Here are
precisely the severe and lonely mood of the opening lines of the poem,
the sense of inaccessible and wind-swept spaces, which Tennyson has so
magnificently and so succinctly conveyed. Here, too, are the far-off,
"wrinkled sea," and the final cataclysmic and sudden descent: yet,
despite the literalism of the close, there is no yielding of artistic
sobriety in the result, for the music has an unassailable dignity. It
remains, even to-day, one of MacDowell's most characteristic and
admirable performances.

Of the "Romance" for 'cello and orchestra (op. 35), the Concert Study
(op. 36), and "Les Orientales" (op. 37),--three _morceaux_ for
piano, after Victor Hugo,--there is no need to speak in detail.
"Perfunctory" is the word which one must use to describe the creative
impulse of which they are the ungrateful legacy--an impulse less
spontaneous, there is reason to believe, than utilitarian. Perhaps
they may most justly be characterised as almost the only instances in
which MacDowell gave heed to the possibility of a reward not primarily
and exclusively artistic. They are sentimental and unleavened, and