[Illustration: A LETTER FROM LISZT TO MACDOWELL ACCEPTING THE
DEDICATION OF THE FIRST PIANO CONCERTO (SEE PAGE 19)]

The following winter was given over largely to composition. The
two-part symphonic poem, "Hamlet and Ophelia," his first production of
important significance, was composed at this time. The "Drei
Poesien" (op. 20) and "Mondbilder" (op. 21), both written for
four-hand performance, also date from the winter of 1884-85, and the
second piano concerto was begun. The "Moon Pictures" of op. 21 ("The
Hindoo Maiden," "Stork's Story," "In Tyrol," "The Swan," "Visit of the
Bear"), after Hans Christian Andersen, were at first intended to form
a miniature orchestral suite; but an opportunity arose to have them
printed as piano duets, and the orchestral sketches were destroyed--a
regrettable outcome, as it seems.

His pupils, he found, were scattered, and he gave himself up without
restraint to the pleasures of creative writing. These were days of
quiet and deep happiness. He read much, often aloud in the
evening--fairy-tales, of which he was devotedly fond, legendary lore
of different countries, mediaeval romances, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson,
Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs, Victor Hugo, Heine; and also Mark Twain.
Later, in the spring, the days were devoted partly to composition and
partly to long walks with his wife in the beautiful Frankfort woods,
where was suggested to MacDowell the particular mood that found
embodiment, many years later, in one of the last things that he wrote:
"From a German Forest," in the collection of "Fireside Tales."

The following summer (1885), the death of a friend of his earlier
Frankfort days, Lindsay Deas, a Scotchman, left vacant in Edinburgh
the post of examiner for the Royal Academy of Music, and Deas's family