two years he was conductor of the
Mendelssohn Glee Club, one of the oldest and best Male-voice
choruses in the United States, and was also, for a short time,
President of the Manuscript Society, an association of American
composers. Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania
conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Music.

In the spring of 1905, MacDowell began to suffer from nervous
exhaustion. Overwork and morbid worry over disagreeable
experiences, especially in connection with his resignation from
Columbia, brought on insomnia. A quiet summer on his Peterboro
property brought no improvement in his condition, and the eminent
medical specialists who attended him soon pronounced his case to
be a hopeless one of cerebral collapse. He should have rested
earlier from both his crowded teaching and his composing.

Slowly, but with terrible sureness, his brainpower was beginning
to crumble away and his mind became as that of a little child.
Day after day he would sit near a window, turning over the pages
of one of his beloved books of fairy-tales, an infinitely moving
and tragic figure.

Time went by and the delicately poised intellect grew more and
more dimmed, until at last he hardly recognised his dearest
friends. A few months before the end his physical strength,
hitherto well preserved, began to fail, until at last he sank
rapidly, dying at 9 o'clock in the evening of January 23rd, 1908,
at the age of forty-six, in the Westminster Hotel, New York, in
the presence of his devoted wife.

A simple service was later held at St. George's Episcopal Church,
and he was buried on the Sunday following his death. His grave is
on an open hilltop of his Peterboro property that he loved, and
is marked by a granite boulder on which is a simple bronze tablet
bearing the lines inscribed at the head of one of his last
pieces, _From a Log Cabin_ (_Op_. 62, _No_. 9), an unconscious
prophesy of his own tragic end:--

_A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun_.

The last music that MacDowell published appeared in 1902, and
indicated the beginning of a new and deeper note in his creative
voice. He felt, too, that he was growing away from pianoforte
work and had he lived there would have been further and more
representative symphonic poems and at least one symphony from his
pen, three movements of the latter being among his unfinished
manuscripts. He ha