In Wagner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, as Pater felt in William Morris's "King Arthur's Tomb," the tyranny of a moon which is "not tender and far-off, but close down--the sorcerer's moon, large and feverish," and the presence of a colouring that is "as of scarlet lilies"; and there is the suggestion of poison, with "a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things." In the music of MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it.

Nor is their passion mystical and detached.

MacDowell in his music is full-blooded, but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he is like Brahms.

The passion by which he is swayed is never, in its expression, ambiguous or exotic, his sensuousness is never luscious.
It is difficult to think of a single passage from which that accent upon which I have dwelt--the accent of nobility, of a certain chivalry, a certain rare and spontaneous dignity--is absent.

Yet he can be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply impassioned, with a sharpness of emotion that is beyond denial.