The form is small; but these pieces are no more justly to be dismissed as mere "miniature work" than is Wordsworth's "Daffodils," which they parallel in delicacy of perception, intensity of vision, and perfection of accomplishment.

The question of bulk, length, size, has quite as much pertinence in one case as in the other.

In his work in this sort, MacDowell is often as one who, having fallen, through the ignominies of daily life, among the barren makeshifts of reality, "remembers the enchanted valleys." It is touched at times with the deep and wistful tenderness, the primaeval nostalgia, which is never very distant from the mood of his writing, and in which, again, one is tempted to trace the essential Celt.

It is this close kinship with the secret presences of the natural world, this intimate responsiveness to elemental moods, this quick sensitiveness to the aroma and the magic of places, that sets him recognisably apart.
If in the "Indian" suite MacDowell disclosed the full maturity of his powers of imaginative and structural design, it is in the "Woodland Sketches" (op.

51) that his speech, freed from such incumbrances as were imposed upon it by his deliberate adoption of an exotic idiom, assumes for the first time some of its most engaging and distinctive characteristics.