him the possibility of throwing off the shackles of the dead and done with.  The contrapuntal formulas and prosaic melodic contours, to be used so magnificently by Handel, were never allowed to harden and fossilise in Purcell’s music.  Even where a phrase threatens us with the dry and commonplace, he gives it a miraculous twist, or adds a touch of harmony that transforms it from a dead into a living thing, from something prosaic into something poetic, rare and enchanting.  Let me instance at once how he could do this in the smallest things.  This is ordinary enough; it might be a bit of eighteenth-century counterpoint: 

[Illustration]

But play it with the second part: 

[Illustration]

The magic of the simple thirds, marked with asterisks, is pure Purcell.  And it is pure magic:  there is no explaining the effect.  He got into his music the inner essence that makes the external beauty of the picturesque England he knew.  That essence was in him; he made it his own and gave it to us.  He did not use much of the folk-songs born of our fields and waters, woods and mountains, and the hearts of our forefathers who lived free and did not dream of smoky cities and stinking slums; though folk-song shaped and modified his melodies.  In himself he had the spirit of Nature, and it made his music come forth as it makes the flowers blow.  The very spirit of the earth seemed to find its voice through him, the spirit of storm 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.