enthusiastic appreciation and applause.

Lanier had a hard, brave struggle to maintain his ideals in the face
of a continually thwarting fate that would have caused many a man,
stronger physically than he, to become discouraged, despairing. Ill
health, poverty and lack of appreciation of his life work had not the
power to destroy his optimism. He bravely waged an unequal combat with
the three, when many a man would have fallen on his own sword to end
the bitter struggle with either one of them. From out the gloom he
sang thus:

"The dark hath many dear avails,
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams and with the heavenly Muse."

Just at the awakening of public appreciation of his work and
recognition of his right to rank as America's greatest composer of
music, MacDowell died to the world of men through a mental collapse
brought on by over-work, and for two years, forgetting that there was
such a thing as music, the great tone-poet dwelt in a soundless world.
Sorrow for such a fate at the zenith of a career of so much promise
was world-wide, and many hoped that he would emerge from the dark,
after a time, with his genius enriched by long subjective communion
with the "heavenly Muse"; but he had dwelt too long in the abstract
world of sound and had heard the music of the spheres until earth
tones became fainter and fainter and finally ceased altogether.

Then, after having admitted his greatness during those two shadowed
years, when the hand of death rang down the curtain on his
earth-drama, his contemporaries began to examine more critically into
the why and wherefore of the decision that accorded him leadership.

A well-known critic calls him the American Grieg, but while applauding
the fanciful style of the Norwegian, one often hears MacDowell accused
of being merely capricious. But what is caprice?

Bishop Trench reminds us in his famous treatise that the word is
derived from _capra_, "a goat," and represents, in a picturesque
manner, a mental movement as unaccountable, as little to be calculated
on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of that whimsical animal.

The work of MacDowell certainly has the characteristic vigor and
vividness, the unstudied activity, the unexpected leaps and springs
that the derivation of the word "caprice" suggests. And, if one cares
for mysticism, it is interesting to know that according to the
teachings of the ancient scien