Two of Ariel’s songs are of course known to everybody—­“Full fathom five” and “Come unto these yellow sands,” both great immortal melodies (in the second Shakespeare’s words are doctored and improved).  The first I have mentioned as a specimen of Purcell’s “word-painting”:  there, at one stroke of immense imaginative power, we have the depths of the sea as vividly painted as in Handel’s “And with the blast,” or “The depths have covered them.”  Another exquisite bit of painting—­mentioned in my first chapter—­is repeated several times:  the rippling sea on a calm day.  It occurs first in Neptune’s song, “While these pass o’er the deep”—­

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Next in Amphitrite’s song, “Halcyon Days,” a serenely lovely melody, we have

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which is a variant.  Then follows “See, the heavens smile,” the opening of the vocal part of which I will quote for its elastic energy: 

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In the instrumental introduction to the song this (and more) is first played by the viols a couple of octaves above, and after it we get our phrase: 

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—­similarly harmonized (but major instead of minor) to the first example, and more fully worked out.  In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained.  One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero’s magic island, and never thought of Shadwell’s stupid and boorish travesty.

The atmosphere of The Fairy Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody.  The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music.  In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been published. The Indian Queen and Bonduca stand badly in need of careful editing—­not in the spirit of one editor of King Arthur who, while declaring that he had altered nothing, stated that he had altered some passages to make them sound better. The Indian Queen contains the recitative “Ye twice ten hundred deities” and the song “By the croaking of the toad.”

Purcell’s forms are not highly organised.  There are fugues, canons, exercises on a ground-bass, and many numbers are dances planned in much the same way as other people’s dances, and songs differing only in their quality from folk-songs.  Of form, as we use the word—­meaning the clean-cut form perfected by Haydn—­I have already asserted that there is none.  This absence of form is held to be a defect by those who regard the Haydn form as an ideal—­an ideal which had to be realised before there could be any music at all, properly speaking.