interpretation of the facts and moods of nature, the rocking of a lily-pad on cool waters, the lonely drift of an iridescent iceberg, the mad sudden impact of a hurrying gust. Often are these interpretations of an almost uncanny intimacy, so subtle and sensitive is their touch. In one very important respect the personal analogy between MacDowell and William Sharp breaks down. The creator of 'Fiona Macleod' gained the freedom of the psychic world only at the expense of his virility. The _man_, Sharp, was left behind, when 'Fiona's' turn came, a fact attested by the writings of the latter at every point. MacDowell found no need for the splitting up of his personality into its masculine and feminine elements; he carried his manhood with him into the sphere of the psychic and brought forth not artistic shadowings merely, but also, especially in his heroic moments, solid structures. For all his instinctive abhorrence of the ponderousness often associated with the expression of the Teutonic spirit, his severe Frankfort training often served him in good stead; it may, indeed, have been the balance-wheel of his entire artistic life. Too much the child of nature's dream-world to sound the depths of passion, too restless with the joy of nature's kaleidoscopic shift and play to touch the spiritual heights of peace, well severed from the material world, but not yet united with the spiritual, MacDowell hovered in the mid-region of the psychic, happily lost in its shadowy wonderworld of dissolving forms and elusive beauty. This was at once the limitation and tragedy, as well as the genius, of MacDowell's life and art. He remained a wanderer on the borderlands of spirit, never coming to his spiritual home, and at the end his mind itself wandered never to return in this life. But he had struck a telling blow for American musical art, and placed the nation upon a new musical footing. MacDowell was a nationalist only by virtue of his instinctive sensitiveness to his environment. As the English critic, Ashton-Johnson, has pointed out, his autumn scenes spontaneously portray not the mere brown decay of the European "fall," but the golden splendor of the American autumn. The Indian and the negro find their way into his works here and there in delicate touches, because the tradition of them is in the American air and scarcely to be avoided.