Not, as a whole, equal to his piano music, they are admirable and deeply individual; and the best of them are not surpassed in any body of modern song-writing.
[Illustration: THE MUSIC-ROOM AT PETERSBORO] In almost all of his songs the voice is predominant over the piano part--although he is far, indeed, from writing mere accompaniments: the support which he gives the voice is consistently important, for he brings to bear upon it all his rich resources of harmonic expression.
But though he makes the voice the paramount element, he uses it, in general, rather as a vehicle for the unconscious exposition of a determined lyricism than as an instrument of precise emotional utterance.

When one thinks of how Hugo Wolf, for example, or Debussy, would have treated the phrase, "to wake again the bitter joy of love," in "Fair Springtide," it will be felt, I think, that MacDowell's setting leaves something to be desired on the score of emotional verity, although the song, as a whole, is one of the loveliest and most spontaneous he has written.

I do not mean to say that he does not often achieve an ideal correspondence between the significance of his text and the effect of his music; but when he does--as in, for instance, that superb tragedy in little, "The Sea,"[16] or in the still finer "Sunrise"[17]--one's impression is that it is the fortunate result of chance, rather than the outcome of deliberate artistic purpose.

It is in songs of an untrammelled lyricism that his art finds its chief opportunity.

In such he is both delightful and satisfying--in, for instance, the six flower songs, "From an Old Garden"; in "Confidence" and "In the Woods" (op.