Although the time at his command was restricted, the eight years of MacDowell's Columbia professorship saw the composition of most of his finest works. For two years he was conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, one of the oldest and best Male-voice choruses in the United States, and was also, for a short time, President of the Manuscript Society, an association of American composers. Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Music.
In the spring of 1905, MacDowell began to suffer from nervous exhaustion. Overwork and morbid worry over disagreeable experiences, especially in connection with his resignation from Columbia, brought on insomnia. A quiet summer on his Peterboro property brought no improvement in his condition, and the eminent medical specialists who attended him soon pronounced his case to be a hopeless one of cerebral collapse. He should have rested earlier from both his crowded teaching and his composing.
Slowly, but with terrible sureness, his brainpower was beginning to crumble away and his mind became as that of a little child. Day after day he would sit near a window, turning over the pages of one of his beloved books of fairy-tales, an infinitely moving and tragic figure.
Time went by and the delicately poised intellect grew more and more dimmed, until at last he hardly recognised his dearest friends. A few months before the end his physical strength, hitherto well preserved, began to fail, until at last he sank rapidly, dying at 9 o'clock in the evening of January 23rd, 1908, at the age of forty-six, in the Westminster Hotel, New York, in the presence of his devoted wife.
A simple service was later held at St. George's Episcopal Church, and he was buried on the Sunday following his death. His grave is on an open hilltop of his Peterboro property that he loved, and is marked by a granite boulder on which is a simple bronze tablet bearing the lines inscribed at the head of one of his last pieces, _From a Log Cabin_ (_Op_. 62, _No_. 9), an unconscious prophesy of his own tragic end:--
_A house of dreams untold, It looks out over the whispering tree-tops And faces the setting sun_.
The last music that MacDowell published appeared in 1902, and indicated the beginning of a new and deeper note in his creative voice. He felt, too, that he was growing away from pianoforte work and had he lived there would have been further and more representative symphonic poems and at least one symphony from his pen, three movements of the latter being among his unfinished manuscripts. He had hoped for ultimate leisure in which to compose, free from the drudgery of earning his living by teaching, and his last great concert tour was undertaken with the idea of gathering money for the realisation of his dream.