ork,
depicting the loveliness and the grieving of Alda, Roland's betrothed.
In spite of its strong Wagnerian leanings, the music bears the impress
of MacDowell's own style, and it has moments of rare loveliness. Both
pieces are programmatic in bent, and, with excellent wisdom, MacDowell
has quoted upon the fly-leaf of the score those portions of the "Song
of Roland" from which the conception of the music sprang.

Like the "Idyls" after Goethe, the "Six Poems" after Heine (op. 31),
for piano, are devoted to the embodiment of a poetic subject,--with
the difference that instead of the landscape impressionism of the
Goethe studies we have a persistent impulse toward psychological
suggestion. Each of the poems which he has selected for illustration
has a burden of human emotion which the music reflects with varying
success. The style is more individualised than in the Goethe pieces,
and the invention is, on the whole, of a superior order. The "Scotch
Poem" (No. 2) is the most successful of the set; the

"... schoene, kranke Frau,
Zartdurchsichtig und marmorblass,"

and her desolate lamenting, are sharply projected, though scarcely
with the power that he would have brought to bear upon the endeavour a
decade later. Less effective, but more characteristic, is "The
Shepherd Boy" (No. 5). This is almost, at moments, MacDowell in the
happiest phase of his lighter vein. The transition from F minor to
major, after the _fermata_ on the second page, is as typical as it is
delectable; and the fifteen bars that follow are of a markedly
personal tinge. "From Long Ago" and "From a Fisherman's Hut" are less
good, and "The Post Wagon" and "Monologue" are disappointing--the
latter especially so, because the exquisite poem which he has chosen
to enforce, the matchless lyric beginning "Der Tod, das ist die kuehle
Nacht," should, it seems, have offered an inspiring incentive.

In the "Four Little Poems" of op. 32 one encounters a piece which it
is possible to admire without qualification: I mean the music
conceived as an illustration to Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle." The
three other numbers of this opus, "The Brook," "Moonshine," and
"Winter," one can praise only in measured terms--although "Winter,"
which attempts a representation of the "widow bird" and frozen
landscape of Shelley's lyric, has some measures that dwell
persistently in the memory: but "The Eagle" is a superb achievement.
Its deliberate purpose is to realise in tone the