d hoped for ultimate leisure in which to
compose, free from the drudgery of earning his living by
teaching, and his last great concert tour was undertaken with the
idea of gathering money for the realisation of his dream.

The death of MacDowell completed the blow which his failing
brain-power had dealt to American music and his many sympathisers,
between two and three years before. His spirit lives, however, in
his music and in the wonderful MacDowell Colony at Peterboro, New
Hampshire. The latter is an amazing realisation of the composer's
dream of an ideal environment for creative work in Music, Art and
Literature. A chapter describing the Colony will be found further
on in this book. In addition to the central organisation, now
known as _The Edward MacDowell Association, Incorporated_, there
are springing up in many American cities offshoots known as
MacDowell Clubs, which contribute towards the expenses of the
Colony.

MACDOWELL AS COMPOSER

Macdowell's position to-day in creative musical art remains the
same as it was twenty years ago--one of unassailable independence
and individualism. Although these two factors, whether assailable
or not, must be a feature of any composer who lays claim to
greatness, in MacDowell's case they are so marked as to form the
strongest bulwark of his natural position among great music
makers. His tone poetry is of a quality and power that is not
quite like that of any other composer, and in the portraying, or
suggesting, as he preferred to call it, of Natural, Historical
and Legendary subjects he stands alone. Superbly gifted as a
lyrical poet both in the literary and the musical sense, and with
a most refined and keen feeling for the dramatic, he spoke with a
voice of singular eloquence and power. Probably his greatest
achievement was his remarkable, unerring ability to create
atmospheres of widely varied kinds in his music, and in this
respect there is no composer quite his equal. The soft beauty,
grandeur, vastness and might of Nature; the joys and sorrows of
Humanity; the romance of History and imaginative Legend; the
buoyancy of sunshine and wind; the mysteriousness of enchanted
woods; all these he translated with inimitable vividness into
music. He could suggest with as definite and unmistakable a
musical atmosphere, the simple beauty of a little wild flower, as
the might of the sea; as well the fanciful and imaginative scenes
of fairy tale as the wild and lonely v