his choruses.  But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more than this, that actually floods you in a moment with a sense of the spacious blue heavens with light clouds flying.  For instance, one gets it in the great “Te Deum” in the first section; again at “To thee, cherubim,” where the first and second trebles run down in liquid thirds with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of “Thou art the King of Glory,” where he uses the old favourite device of following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in one part by the sharp leading note in another part—­a device used with even more exquisite result in the chorus of “Full fathom five.”  Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart.  In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it.  Purcell’s touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—­pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, the sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of emotional tension that inevitably results when one comes on a patch of simple naked beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful exaltation had been anticipated.  That Purcell foresaw this result, and deliberately used the means to achieve it, I cannot doubt.  Those momentary slackenings of tense excitement are characteristic of the exalted mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known that they really go to augment its intensity.  All Purcell’s choruses, however, are not of Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the deepest sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an “unbuttoned” festivity of feeling, such as never came into music again until Beethoven introduced it as a new thing.  The opening of one of the complimentary odes, “Celebrate this festival,” fairly carries one off one’s feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking rhythm and living melody of it.  One of the most magnificent examples of picturesque music ever written—­if not the most magnificent, at any rate the most delightful in detail—­is the anthem, “Thy way, O God, is holy.”  The picture-painting is prepared for with astonishing artistic foresight, and when it begins the effect is tremendous.  I advise everyone who wishes to realise Purcell’s unheard-of fertility of great and powerful themes to look at “The clouds poured out water,” the fugue subject “The voice of Thy thunders,” the biting emphasis of the passage “the lightnings shone upon the ground,” and the irresistible impulse of “The earth was moved.”