human streams flowing between Italy and the North, and with Sion still looking down from its heights, where the bishops had been lords rather than priests.  But this was for him a purely imaginative enchantment.  He cared little about exploring the actual and visible memorials of the past:  to confront them as crumbling ruins gave him no pleasure, and, as he used to say, he “hated the smells.”  It was this instinct which, in his visits to the cathedrals, prompted him to stand as far back as possible while the Mass was being said.  To see in the dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests describing perfunctorily the relics:  that was a disillusionment not to be borne with.

[Illustration:  A SKETCH OF LISZT BY MACDOWELL DRAWN IN 1883]

Having found that his labours at Darmstadt were telling upon his health, MacDowell resigned his position there and returned to Frankfort.  Here he divided his time between his private teaching and his composition.  He was ambitious also to secure some profitable concert engagements as a pianist.  He had made occasional appearances at orchestral concerts in Wiesbaden, Frankfort, Darmstadt, but these had yielded him no return save an increase of reputation.

At Raff’s instigation he visited Liszt at Weimar in the spring of 1882, armed with his first piano concerto (op. 15).  This work he had just composed under amusing circumstances.  One day while he was sitting aimlessly before his piano there came a knock at his door, and in walked, to his startled confusion, his master, Raff, of whom MacDowell stood in unmitigated awe.  “The honor,” he relates, “simply overwhelmed me.  He looked rather quizzically around at my untidy room, and said something about the English translation of his Welt-Ende oratorio (I found out after, alas, that he had wanted me to copy it in his score for him; but with his inexplicable shyness he only hinted at it, and I on my side was too utterly and idiotically overpowered to catch his meaning); then he abruptly asked me what I had been writing.  I, scarcely realising what I was saying, stammered out that I had a concerto.  He walked out on the landing and turned back, telling me to bring it to him the next Sunday.  In desperation, not having the remotest idea how I was to accomplish such a task, I worked like a beaver, evolving the music from some ideas upon which I had planned at some time to base a concerto.  Sunday came, and I had only the first movement composed.  I wrote him a note making some wretched excuse, and he put it off until the Sunday after.  Something happened then, and he put it off two days more; by that time I had the concerto ready.”  Except for three lines of passage work in the first part, the concerto remains to-day precisely as MacDowell finished it then.