angely prophetic when he
wrote them--which are now inscribed on the memorial tablet near his
grave:--

"A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun."

[Illustration: THE "HOUSE OF DREAMS UNTOLD"--THE LOG CABIN IN THE
WOODS AT PETERBORO WHERE MACDOWELL COMPOSED, AND WHERE MOST OF HIS
LATER MUSIC WAS WRITTEN]

The music of this piece is suffused with a mood that is Schumann-like
in its intense sincerity of impulse, yet with a passionate fulness and
ardour not elsewhere to be paralleled. It is steeped in an atmosphere
which is felt in no other of his works, is the issue of an inspiration
more profoundly contemplative than any to which he had hitherto
responded.

CHAPTER VI

THE SONATAS

MacDowell never hesitated, as I have elsewhere said, to adapt--some
would say "warp"--the sonata form to the needs of his poetic purposes.
Moreover, he declared his convictions as to the considerations which
should govern its employment. "If the composer's ideas do not
imperatively demand treatment in that [the sonata] form," he has
observed--"that is, if his first theme is not actually dependent upon
his second and side themes for its poetic fulfilment--he has not
composed a sonata movement, but a potpourri, which the form only
aggravates." There can be little question of the success which has
attended his application of this principle to his own performances in
this field, nor of the skill and tact with which he has reshaped the
form in accordance with his chosen poetic or dramatic scheme.

His four sonatas belong undeniably, though with a variously strict
allegiance, to the domain of programme-music. Neither the "Tragica,"
the "Eroica," the "Norse," nor the "Keltic," makes its appeal
exclusively to the tonal sense. If one looks to these works for the
particular kind of gratification which he is accustomed to derive, for
example, from a sonata by Brahms (to name the most extreme of
contrasts), he will not find it. It is impossible fully to appreciate
and enjoy the last page of the "Keltic," for instance, without some
knowledge of the dramatic crisis upon which the musician has
built--although its beauty and power, as sheer music, are immediately
perceptible.

With the exception of the "Tragica," the poetic substratum of the
sonatas has been avowed with more or less particularity. In the
"Tragica"--his first essay in the form--he has vouchsafed only the
general