If in the "Indian" suite MacDowell disclosed the full maturity of his powers of imaginative and structural design, it is in the "Woodland Sketches" (op. 51) that his speech, freed from such incumbrances as were imposed upon it by his deliberate adoption of an exotic idiom, assumes for the first time some of its most engaging and distinctive characteristics. Consider, for example, number eight of the group, "A Deserted Farm." Here is the quintessence of his style in one of its most frequent aspects. The manner has a curious simplicity, yet it would be difficult to say in what, precisely, the simplicity consists; it has striking individuality,--yet the particular trait in which it resides is not easily determined. The simplicity is certainly not of the harmonic plan, nor of the melodic outline, which are subtly yet frankly conceived; and the individuality does not lie in any eccentricity or determined novelty of effect. Both the flavour of simplicity and of personality are, one concludes, more a spiritual than an anatomical possession of the music. Its quality is as intangible and pervasive as that dim magic of "unremembering remembrance" that is awakened in some by the troubling tides of spring; it is apparently as unsought for as are the naive utterances of folk-song. It is his unfailing charm, and it is everywhere manifest in his later work: that spontaneity and _insouciance_, that utter absence of self-consciousness, which is in nothing so surprising as in its serene antithesis to what one has come to accept--too readily, it may be--as the dominant accent of musical modernity. These pieces have an inescapable fragrance, tenderness, and zest. "To a Wild Rose," "Will o' the Wisp," "In Autumn," "From Uncle Remus," and "By a Meadow Brook" are slight in poetic substance, though executed with charm and humour; but the five other pieces--"At an Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," "To a Water-lily," "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset"--are of a different calibre. With the exception of "To a Water-lily," whose quality is uncomplex and unconcealed, these tone-poems in little are a curious blend of what, lacking an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, and psychological suggestion; and they are remarkable for the manner in which they focus great richness of emotion into limited space. "At an Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset," imply a consecutive dramatic purpose which is emphasised by their connection through a hint of thematic community. The element of drama, though, is not insisted upon--indeed, a large portion of the searching charm of these pieces lies in their tactful reticence.