In 1881 MacDowell applied for the vacant position of head piano teacher at the Conservatory in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt, and was engaged.  He found it an arduous and not too profitable post.  He has described it as “a dreary town, where the pupils studied music with true German placidity.”  They procured all their music from a circulating library, where the choice of novelties was limited to late editions of the classics and a good deal of sheer trash, poor dance music and the like.  His work, which was unmitigated drudgery, consumed forty hours a week.  For a time he took up his quarters in Darmstadt; but he missed the attractions of Frankfort; so throughout his term he travelled on the railroad twice daily between the two towns.  In addition to his regular work at the Conservatory, he undertook private lessons, going by train once a week to the Erbach-Fuerstenau castle at Erbach-Fuerstenau, a wearisome three-hour journey.  The castle was a mediaeval Schloss, with a drawbridge and moat.  There his pupils were little counts and countesses, discouragingly dull and sleepy children who spoke only German and Latin, and who had the smallest interest in music.  MacDowell gave them lessons in harmony as well as piano-playing, and one day, in the middle of an elaborately simplified exposition of some rudimentary point, he heard a gentle noise, looked around from the piano, and discovered his noble young pupils with their heads on their arms, fast asleep.  MacDowell could never remember their different titles, and ended by addressing them simply as “mademoiselle” and “monsieur,” to the annoyance of the stern and ceremonious old chatelaine, the Baroness of Rodenberg.

The twelve hours a week which he spent in railway travelling were not, though, wholly unprofitable, for he was able to compose on the train the greater part of his second “Modern Suite” for piano (op. 14).  This was the second of his compositions which he considered worthy of preservation, its predecessor being the “First Modern Suite,” written the year before in Frankfort.  Much other music had already found its way upon paper, had been tried in the unsparing fire of his criticism, which was even then vigorous and searching, and had been marked for destruction—­a symphony, among other efforts.  His reading at this time was of engrossing interest to him.  He was absorbed in the German poets; Goethe and Heine, whom he was now able to read with ease in the original German, he knew by heart—­a devotion which was to find expression a few years later in his “Idyls” and “Poems” (op. 28 and 31).  He had begun also to read the English poets.  He devoured Byron and Shelley; and in Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King” he found the spark which kindled his especial love for mediaeval lore and poetry.  Yet while he was enamored of the imaginative records of the Middle Ages, he had little interest, oddly enough, in their tangible remains.  He liked, for example, to summon a vision of the valley of the Rhone, with its slow-moving