As the first modern American composer to step forth with a highly characterized poetic individuality, Edward Alexander MacDowell (b. 1861, d. 1908) quickly took, and his work has held, since his untimely death in 1908, a unique and preëminent place in American music. As the first great pioneer of the romantic school in America his place is certainly assured, and, while the perspective thus far gained upon his work has by no means led to a unanimity of opinion concerning it, the dignity, charm, and poetic fancy of a great part of it must assuredly give it an enduring position in the musical world. All barriers of adverse criticism and opinion fall before creativeness, to the extent to which it is truly creative, and it is the creative character of MacDowell's music that insures its persistence. Noteworthy is it also that it is through his greatest works, such as the second piano concerto and the Celtic Sonata, that his fame chiefly endures, a convincing evidence that his highest aspirations did not strike wide of their mark. An inquiry into the nature of MacDowell's genius must perforce lead us to a recognition of his Celtic antecedents and sympathies; for with all his early German experience and training, with all his substantial Teutonic technical foundation gained thereby, he was first and last a Celt in spirit. Over the heavy bog of German harmony and counterpoint his sensitive fancy danced like restless thistledown, following the lightest whimsey of the breeze and the most tremulous maneuverings of shadow-play. In his more powerful tone painting it is the elements, rather than the passions, that command him. The old nature-worship which is so ineradicable an element of the psychic constitution of the Celt, and which leads him to commune with the innumerable and elusive hosts of the land of faery, never forsook the soul of MacDowell, or ceased to direct the course of his genius. Impatient of the restraints of the outer world, and of its weight of poetry-quenching affairs and transactions, his spirit hurried ever to a communion with the moods and mysteries of nature, and to that corresponding dream-world of intensified nature-perceptions within the soul to which these are the appointed and the alluring gateway. MacDowell's dream-world was directly conjoined with that of 'Fiona Macleod,' whose subjective nature-pictures offer a close literary parallel to the tone-pictures of the composer. These two traversed the same region, which is that of the psychic perceptions, but the account of it brought back by MacDowell presents one striking fundamental difference from all accounts rendered by poetry-making Celts who have remained upon their native soil. In the American the soul no longer cries out from under an age-long burden of poverty and oppression; the heartache and the world-weariness have been sloughed off in the new-world birth. No outcry of the heart is the music of MacDowell, but an eager self-surrendering to the