In studying MacDowell, one is reminded at every turn of this dual genius. Like Lanier, his message is being better understood every year, and now that he is gone, "fulfillment is dropping on a come-true dream." MacDowell had great advantages over Lanier in his early life in freedom from financial worry. In his youth he was privileged to travel and search until he found his own real masters, in the Frankfort Conservatory, where he studied piano with Heymann and composition with Raff. At Weimar he met Liszt, who recognized his ability and accorded him such unstinted praise that he was invited to play his first piano suite before the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musik-Verein at its nineteenth annual convention, held at Zurich in July, 1882. Both the composition and his rendition of it won enthusiastic appreciation and applause. Lanier had a hard, brave struggle to maintain his ideals in the face of a continually thwarting fate that would have caused many a man, stronger physically than he, to become discouraged, despairing. Ill health, poverty and lack of appreciation of his life work had not the power to destroy his optimism. He bravely waged an unequal combat with the three, when many a man would have fallen on his own sword to end the bitter struggle with either one of them. From out the gloom he sang thus: "The dark hath many dear avails, The dark distils divinest dews; The dark is rich with nightingales, With dreams and with the heavenly Muse." Just at the awakening of public appreciation of his work and recognition of his right to rank as America's greatest composer of music, MacDowell died to the world of men through a mental collapse brought on by over-work, and for two years, forgetting that there was such a thing as music, the great tone-poet dwelt in a soundless world. Sorrow for such a fate at the zenith of a career of so much promise was world-wide, and many hoped that he would emerge from the dark, after a time, with his genius enriched by long subjective communion with the "heavenly Muse"; but he had dwelt too long in the abstract world of sound and had heard the music of the spheres until earth tones became fainter and fainter and finally ceased altogether. Then, after having admitted his greatness during those two shadowed years, when the hand of death rang down the curtain on his earth-drama, his contemporaries began to examine more critically into the why and wherefore of the decision that accorded him leadership. A well-known critic calls him the American Grieg, but while applauding the fanciful style of the Norwegian, one often hears MacDowell accused of being merely capricious. But what is caprice? Bishop Trench reminds us in his famous treatise that the word is derived from _capra_, "a goat," and represents, in a picturesque manner, a mental movement as unaccountable, as little to be calculated on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of that whimsical animal.