st-chaise is told fairly graphically in the
fourth piece. The music is not very interesting, although its
hurried progress suggests the monotony of travel in a rumbling
vehicle on a night journey.

The fifth piece is lovely and tender, but not particularly
expressive. The last of the set opens with a noble, half-sad
melody that is typical of MacDowell. Its agitated middle section
provides a good contrast.

Two of the poems were played in orchestral garb for the first
time in England at a London Queen's Hall Promenade Concert on
October 3rd, 1916. They were No. 6, _Poeme erotique_, and No. 2,
_Scotch Poem_.

OPUS 32. FOUR LITTLE POEMS, FOR PIANOFORTE.

_Composed, Wiesbaden, about_ 1888. _Revised by the Composer_,
1906. _Copyrighted_ 1894 _and_ 1906 (Breitkopf & Haertel).

1. _The Eagle._

2. _The Brook._

3. _Moonshine._

4. _Winter._

These pieces are, in their revised version, more individual and
more worth playing than any of the preceding small pianoforte
works by MacDowell. They have his true ring and stamp, although
even here not in its most highly-developed form, and they
exemplify his already unerring power to create atmospheres of
far-reaching significance, even in tiny spaces, for all four
poems are but two-page pieces, and the most striking, _The
Eagle_, is but twenty-six bars in length.

1. _The Eagle_ is a tone picture of Tennyson's lines:--

_He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls._

The opening high, wind-swept chords; the succeeding
softly-breathed, high chromatics, with the deep-voiced bass,
creating an atmosphere of the vast loneliness of wild mountain
heights; the gradual descent to spell-binding silence and then
the startling shriek and swoop down of the eagle--all these are
suggested in this tiny piece with unmistakable power. _The Eagle_
is remarkable for its programme music aspect in the light of
MacDowell's later works, for in these it is perfected suggestion
and not realism that we find.

2. _The Brook_ is a clever little piece, delicate and refined. It
begins with lovable simplicity, which is broken for a time by an
expressive and characteristic passage marked _sotto voce_. The
piece as a whole has for its motto Bulwer's lines:--

_Gay below the cowslip bank, see the b