It is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty and character.

He had, of course, his period of crude experimentation, his days of discipleship.

In his earlier writing there is not a little that is unworthy of him: much in which one seeks vainly for that note of distinction and personality which sounds so constantly throughout the finer body of his work.

But in that considerable portion of his output which is genuinely representative--say from his opus 45 onward--he sustains his art upon a noteworthy level of fineness and strength.
The range of his expressional gamut is striking.

One is at a loss to say whether he is happier in emotional moments of weighty significance,--as in many pages of the sonatas and some of the "Sea Pieces,"-- or in such cameo-like performances as the "Woodland Sketches," certain of the "Marionettes,"[9] and the exquisite song group, "From an Old Garden," in which he attains an order of delicate eloquence difficult to associate with the mind which shaped the heroic ardours of the "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas.