sea-spell, deep woods, an old garden.  As a fair exemplification of his practice, consider, let me say, his “To a Water-lily,” from the “Woodland Sketches.”  It is difficult to recall anything in objective tone-painting, for the piano or for the orchestra, conceived and executed quite in the manner of this remarkable piece of lyrical impressionism.  Of all the composers who have essayed tonal transcriptions of the phases of the outer world, I know of none who has achieved such vividness and suggestiveness of effect with a similar condensation.  The form is small; but these pieces are no more justly to be dismissed as mere “miniature work” than is Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” which they parallel in delicacy of perception, intensity of vision, and perfection of accomplishment.  The question of bulk, length, size, has quite as much pertinence in one case as in the other.  In his work in this sort, MacDowell is often as one who, having fallen, through the ignominies of daily life, among the barren makeshifts of reality, “remembers the enchanted valleys.”  It is touched at times with the deep and wistful tenderness, the primaeval nostalgia, which is never very distant from the mood of his writing, and in which, again, one is tempted to trace the essential Celt.  It is this close kinship with the secret presences of the natural world, this intimate responsiveness to elemental moods, this quick sensitiveness to the aroma and the magic of places, that sets him recognisably apart.

If in the “Indian” suite MacDowell disclosed the full maturity of his powers of imaginative and structural design, it is in the “Woodland Sketches” (op. 51) that his speech, freed from such incumbrances as were imposed upon it by his deliberate adoption of an exotic idiom, assumes for the first time some of its most engaging and distinctive characteristics.  Consider, for example, number eight of the group, “A Deserted Farm.”  Here is the quintessence of his style in one of its most frequent aspects.  The manner has a curious simplicity, yet it would be difficult to say in what, precisely, the simplicity consists; it has striking individuality,—­yet the particular trait in which it resides is not easily determined.  The simplicity is certainly not of the harmonic plan, nor of the melodic outline, which are subtly yet frankly conceived; and the individuality does not lie in any eccentricity or determined novelty of effect.  Both the flavour of simplicity and of personality are, one concludes, more a spiritual than an anatomical possession of the music.  Its quality is as intangible and pervasive as that dim magic of “unremembering remembrance” that is awakened in some by the troubling tides of spring; it is apparently as unsought for as are the naive utterances of folk-song.  It is his unfailing charm, and it is everywhere manifest in his later work:  that spontaneity and insouciance, that utter absence of self-consciousness, which is in nothing so surprising as in its serene antithesis to what one has come to accept—­too readily, it may be—­as the dominant accent of musical modernity.