for which he appeared to have a distaste, since the instrument is not required in any of his orchestral works.  That he was not satisfied with the scoring of the work is known.  He remarked to Mr. Philip Hale that it was “too full of horns”; and in his own copy of the score, which I possess, he has made in pencil numerous changes in the instrumentation, much to its improvement; he has, for instance, in accord with his expressed feeling, reduced the prominence of the horns, allotting their parts, in certain important instances, to the wood-wind, trombones, or trumpets.

The “Six Idyls after Goethe,” for piano (op. 28), are noteworthy as foreshadowing the candid impressionism which was to have its finest issue in the “Woodland Sketches,” “Sea Pieces,” and “New England Idyls.”  The Goethe paraphrases, although they have only a tithe of the graphic nearness and felicity of the later pieces, are yet fairly successful in their attempt to find a musical correspondence for certain definitely stated concepts and ideas—­a partial fulfilment of the method implied in the earlier “Wald-Idyllen.”  He presents himself here as one who has yielded his imagination to an intimate contemplation of the natural world, and who already has, in some degree, the faculty of uttering whatever revelation of its loveliness or majesty has been vouchsafed.  At once, in studying these pieces, one observes a wide departure in method and accomplishment from the style of the “Wald-Idyllen.”  In those, it seemed, the poet had somehow failed to compose “with his eye on the object”:  the vision lacked steadiness, lacked penetration—­or it may be that the vision was present, but not the power of notation.  In the Goethe paraphrases, on the other hand, we are given, in a measure, the sense of the thing perceived; I say “in a measure,” for his power of acute and sympathetic observation and of eloquent transmutation had not yet come to its highest pitch.  Of the six “Idyls,” three—­“In the Woods,” “Siesta,” and “To the Moonlight”—­are memorable, though uneven; and of these the third, after Goethe’s “An den Mond,” adumbrates faintly MacDowell’s riper manner.  The “Silver Clouds,” “Flute Idyl,"[11] and “Blue Bell” are decidedly less characteristic.

[11] The poems which suggested this and the preceding piece were used again by MacDowell in two of the most admirable of the “Eight Songs,” op. 47.

His third orchestral work, the symphonic poem “Lamia,” is based upon the fantastic (and what Mr. Howells would call unconscionably “romanticistic”) poem of Keats.  Begun during his last year in Wiesbaden (1888), and completed the following winter in Boston, it stands, in the order of MacDowell’s orchestral pieces, between “Lancelot and Elaine” and the two “fragments” after the “Song of Roland.”  On a fly-leaf of the score MacDowell has written this glossary of the story as told by Keats: