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 they are far from worthy of his gifts, though they are not without a certain rather inexpensive charm.

[Illustration:  A WINTER VIEW OF THE PETERBORO HOUSE]

The “Marionettes” of op. 38 are in a wholly different case.  Published first in 1888, the year of MacDowell’s return to America, they were afterward extensively revised, and now appear under a radically different guise.  In its present form, the group comprises six genre studies—­“Soubrette,” “Lover,” “Witch,” “Clown,” “Villain,” “Sweetheart”—­besides two additions:  a “Prologue” and “Epilogue.”  Here MacDowell is in one of his happiest moods.  It was a fortunate and charming conceit which prompted the plan of the series, with its half-playful, half-ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, there is, throughout, an undertone of grave and meditative tenderness which it is one of the peculiar properties of MacDowell’s art to communicate and enforce.  This is continually apparent in “The Lover” and “Sweetheart,” fugitively so in the “Prologue,” and, in an irresistible degree, in the exceedingly poetic and deeply felt “Epilogue”—­one of the most typical and beautiful of MacDowell’s smaller works.  The music of these pieces is, as with other of his earlier works that he has since