As one looks back from this imposing event over the course of Dvořák's laborious, persistent youth, one's attention, no matter how much it is at first engaged with the changes of his outer life, with his progress from obscure poverty to comfort and fame, soon dwells even more on the underlying identity of the man through all changes, on his unswerving simplicity of nature and steadfastness of aim. More remarkable than the diversity of his career is the unity of his character. From first to last, whether in Mühlhausen, Prague, London, or New York, he is essentially a peasant. His deepest moral trait is the dumb persistence, the unthinking doggedness, of the peasant. His mental atmosphere is the peasant's innocence of self-consciousness, his unintrospective candor. Not like the sophisticated man, who weighs motives and foresees obstacles, does he pursue his troublous way. He is, on the contrary, like an engine placed on the track and started; through darkness and day, through failure and success, through weakness and strength, he steams ahead, ever propelled by irresistible inner force, insensible and unamenable to circumstance. And his musical impulse is of the same sort. His aims in music have always been simple, definite, unsophisticated by intellectualism. Taking keen delight in the sensuous beauty of sound, gifted with the musical sense in its most fundamental form of physical susceptibility, from his earliest days he set about learning to produce pleasant effects of rhythm and consonance, with utter sincerity, with no reference to derivative and secondary musical values. When, as a boy, he heard the villagers playing their native dances, his blood stirred in sympathy, and as soon as he was able he took a hand. When he was older he invented similar pieces, gradually refining them, but always cherishing the brightness of tone, the vigor of rhythmic life, that had first won his devotion. And when, in New York, an experienced and honored musician, he was expected to advise our composers, it was highly characteristic of him that he recommended them to pour their ideas into the negro molds. Here was a music simple, sensuous, highly rhythmic; he looked no further, he was disconcerted by no ethnological problems, nor even by the incongruity that any man of the world would have seen between negro song and our subtly mingled, highly complex American character. Bohemian folk-melodies had expressed him; why should not plantation tunes express us? But perhaps his curious simplicity reveals itself most of all in his perfectly uncritical fecundity as a composer. He writes with extreme rapidity, and indefatigably. The great Stabat Mater is said to have been completed in six weeks, and his opus numbers extend beyond a hundred. He writes as if nothing existed in the world but himself and an orchestra waiting to play his scores. He is never embarrassed by a sense of limitation, by the perception in others of powers he lacks.