m and the spirit of fair
weather that sports when sweet rains make a musical clatter among the
leaves. The music in which he found a voice for Nature cannot grow old
while the earth renews its youth with each returning spring. In its
pathos and in its joy the soul of seventeenth-century England is in his
music in perennial health.

This is not a fanciful description: it is the plainest, most
matter-of-fact description. Purcell's music has the same effect on the
mind as a crowd of young leaves shooting from a branch in spring; it has
a quality of what I risk calling green picturesqueness, sweet and pure,
and fresh and vigorous. It is music that has grown and was not made.
That Purcell knew perfectly well what he was doing we realise easily
when we turn to the music he set to particular words. Take _The Tempest_
music, and turn to the song "Arise, ye subterranean winds." See how the
accompaniment surges up in imperious, impetuous strength. Turn to "See,
the heavens smile": note how the resonant swinging chords and that
lovely figure playing on the top give one an instant vision of vast,
translucent sea-depths and the ripples lapping above. Look at "Come unto
these yellow sands" and "Full fathom five": he almost gives us the
colour of the sea and the shore. These things did not come by accident,
nor do they exist only in an enthusiastic fancy. They were meant; they
are there; and only the deaf and the stupid, or those over-steeped in
the later classical music, can help feeling them.

Purcell, then, was the last of the English musicians. So fair and sweet
a morning saw the end that many good folk have regarded the end as the
beginning, as only the promise of an opulent summer day. How glorious
the day might have been had Purcell lived, no one can say; but he died,
and no great genius has arisen since. As for the cathedral organists who
followed him chronologically, the less said about them the better. What
kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see in the music they
wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we may judge from the
music they played and the beggarly organs they played on. We read of our
"great Church musicians"--but these men were not musicians; and of the
rich stores of Church music--but, however vast its quantity, it is not,
properly speaking, music. The great English musicians who wrote for the
Church before Purcell's time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons,
and they composed not for t