popular and hackneyed pieces, as the “Hexentanz” and the much-mauled and over-sentimental song, “Thy Beaming Eyes,” he had a detestation that was amusing in its virulence.  He regretted at times that his earlier orchestral works—­“Hamlet and Ophelia” and “Lancelot and Elaine”—­had been published; and he was invariably tormented by questionings and misgivings after he had committed even his ripest work to his publisher.  Only the assurances of his wise and devoted wife at times prevented him from recalling a completed work.  Yet he was always touched, delighted, and genuinely cheered by what he felt to be sincere and thoughtful praise.  To a writer who had published an admiring article concerning some of his later music he wrote: 

    “MY DEAR MR.——­: 

“Your article was forwarded to me after all.  I wish to thank you for the warm-hearted and sympathetic enthusiasm which prompted your writing it.  While my outgivings have always been sincere, I feel only too often their inadequacy to express my ideals; thus what you speak of as accomplishment I fear is often but attempt.  Certainly your sympathy for my aims is most welcome and precious to me, and I thank you again most heartily.”

Those who knew the man only through his music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely things of the world.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He was overflowingly human, notably full-blooded.  On his “farm” (as he called it) at Peterboro he lived, when he was not composing, a robust and vigorous outdoor life.  He was an ardent sportsman, and he spent much of his time in the woods and fields, fishing, riding, walking, hunting.  He had a special relish for gardening and for photography, and he liked to undertake laborious jobs in carpentry, at which he was quite deft.  That his feeling for the things of the natural world was acutely sensitive and coloured by imagination and emotion is abundantly evidenced in his music.  He was fond of taking long, leisurely drives and rides through the rich and varied hill country about Peterboro, and many of the impressions that were then garnered and stored have found issue in some of his most intimate and affecting music—­as in the “Woodland Sketches” and “New England Idyls.”  He had an odd, naive tenderness for growing things and for the creatures of the woods:  it distressed him to have his wife water some of the flowers in the garden without watering them all; and though an excellent shot, he never brought down game without a pang—­it used to be said at Peterboro that for this reason he only “pretended to hunt,” despite his expertness as a marksman.