Here you will find a beauty which is as “the beauty of the men that take up spears and die for a name,” no less than “the beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow and the wandering road”—­a harp shaken with a wild and piercing music, a sorrow that is not of to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual and imperishable, and men lived the tales of beauty and of wonder which now are but a discredited and fading memory.

[15] Dedicated, like the “Norse,” to Grieg.

It was a fortunate, if not an inevitable, event, in view of his temperamental affiliations with the Celtic genius, that MacDowell should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, and that he should have gone for his inspiration, in particular, to the legends comprised in the famous Cycle of the Red Branch:  that wonderful group of epics which comprises, among other tales, the story of the matchless Deirdre,—­whose loveliness was such, so say the chroniclers, that “not upon the ridge of earth was there a woman so beautiful,”—­and the life and adventures and glorious death of the incomparable Cuchullin.  These two kindred legends MacDowell has welded into a coherent and satisfying whole; and in a verse with which he prefixes the sonata, he gives this index to its poetic content: 

  “Who minds now Keltic tales of yore,
    Dark Druid rhymes that thrall;
  Deirdre’s song, and wizard lore
    Of great Cuchullin’s fall.”

At the time of the publication of the sonata he wrote to me as follows concerning it: 

“...  Here is the sonata, which it is a pleasure to me to offer you as a token of sympathy.  I enclose also some lines [of his own verse] anent Cuchullin, which, however, do not entirely fit the music, and which I hope to use in another musical form.  They may serve, however, to aid the understanding of the stimmung of the sonata.  Cuchullin’s story is in touch with the Deirdre-Naesi tale; and, as with my 3rd Sonata, the music is more a commentary on the subject than an actual depiction of it.”

[Illustration:  FACSIMILE OF A PASSAGE FROM THE ORIGINAL MS. OF THE “KELTIC” SONATA]

The “lines anent Cuchullin” I quote below.  They do not, as he said, have a parallel in the sonata as a whole; but in the coda of the last movement (of which I shall speak later) he has attempted a commentary on the scene which he here describes: 

  “Cuchullin fought and fought in vain,
  ’Gainst faery folk and Druid thrall: 
  And as the queenly sun swept down. 
  In royal robes, red gold besown,
  With one last lingering glance
  He sate himself in lonely state
  Against a giant monolith,
  To wait Death’s wooing call. 
  None dared approach the silent shape
  That froze to iron majesty,
  Save the wan, mad daughters of old Night,
  Blind, wandering maidens of the mist,