more worth playing than any of the preceding small pianoforte
works by MacDowell. They have his true ring and stamp, although
even here not in its most highly-developed form, and they
exemplify his already unerring power to create atmospheres of
far-reaching significance, even in tiny spaces, for all four
poems are but two-page pieces, and the most striking, _The
Eagle_, is but twenty-six bars in length.

1. _The Eagle_ is a tone picture of Tennyson's lines:--

_He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls._

The opening high, wind-swept chords; the succeeding
softly-breathed, high chromatics, with the deep-voiced bass,
creating an atmosphere of the vast loneliness of wild mountain
heights; the gradual descent to spell-binding silence and then
the startling shriek and swoop down of the eagle--all these are
suggested in this tiny piece with unmistakable power. _The Eagle_
is remarkable for its programme music aspect in the light of
MacDowell's later works, for in these it is perfected suggestion
and not realism that we find.

2. _The Brook_ is a clever little piece, delicate and refined. It
begins with lovable simplicity, which is broken for a time by an