Whose creeping fingers, cold and white,
  Oft by the sluggard dead are kissed. 
  And yet the monstrous Thing held sway,
  No living soul dared say it nay;
  When lo! upon its shoulder still,
  Unconscious of its potent will,
  There perched a preening birdling gray,
  A’weary of the dying day;
  And all the watchers knew the lore: 
  Cuchullin was no more.”

To Mr. Corey MacDowell wrote: 

“...  Even though you are not on intimate terms with Deirdre, Cuchullin, etc., you will easily perceive from the music that something extremely unpleasant is happening.  Joking aside, I will confess to a certain fascination the subject has for me.  So much so that my ‘motto’ [the original motto—­the verses which I have quoted above] spread beyond the music; therefore I am going to make a different work of the former, and for the sonata I adopted the modest quatrain that is printed in it....  Like the third, this fourth sonata is more of a ‘bardic’ rhapsody on the subject than an attempt at actual presentation of it, although I have made use of all the suggestion of tone-painting in my power,—­just as the bard would have reinforced his speech with gesture and facial expression.”

He aimed to make his music, as he says, “more a commentary on the subject than an actual depiction of it”; but the case would be stated more truly, I think, if one were to say that he has penetrated to the heart of the entire body of legends, has imbued himself with their ultimate spirit and significance, and has bodied it forth in his music with splendid veracity and eloquence.  He has attempted no mere musical recounting of those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at which he hints in his brief motto.  It would be juster to say, rather, that he has recalled in his music the very life and presence of the Gaelic prime—­that he has “unbound the Island harp.”  Above all, he has achieved that “heroic beauty” which, believes Mr. Yeats, has been fading out of the arts since “that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place”—­that heroic beauty which is of the very essence of the imaginative life of the primitive Celts, and which the Celtic “revival” in contemporary letters has so signally failed to revive.  For it is, I repeat, the heroic Gaelic world that MacDowell has made to live again in his music:  that miraculous world of stupendous passions and aspirations, of bards and heroes and great adventure—­the world of Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdre the Beautiful, and Fergus, and Connla the Harper, and those kindred figures, lovely or greatly tragical, that are like no other figures in the world’s mythologies.