“Samson” is not his finest oratorio, though it may be his longest.  It contains no “Unto us a Child is born” nor a “Worthy is the Lamb,” nor a “Now love, that everlasting boy”; but in several places the sublime is reached—­in “Then round about the starry throne,” the last page of which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel’s time save Beethoven’s “Mount of Olives”; in “Fixed is His everlasting seat,” with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of “O first created beam.”  The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there is not one of them to match “Ye tutelar gods” in “Belshazzar.”  But there is little in “Belshazzar” to match the pathos of “Return, O God of hosts,” or “Ye sons of Israel, now lament.”  The latter is a notable example of Handel’s art.  There is not a new phrase in it:  nothing, indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first occurrence of “Amongst the dead great Samson lies,” and yet the effect is amazing; and though the “for ever” is as old as Purcell, here it is newly used—­used as if it had never been used before—­to utter a depth of emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime.  This very vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart.  But occasionally the personal note may be met.  The recitative “My genial spirits fail,” with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at “And lay me gently down with them that rest,” seems almost like Handel’s own voice in a moment of sad depression.  It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound to continue to the end.  But these personal confessions are scarce.  After all, in oratorio Handel’s best music is that in which he seeks to attain the sublime.  In his choruses he does attain it:  he sweeps you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the opening of “Fixed in His everlasting seat,” or the last (before the cadence) in “Then round about the starry throne.”  It is true that with his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or nearly equal to Bach’s, he was often tempted to write in his uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt him, so that if he began with a commonplace “Let their celestial concerts all unite,” before the end he was pouring forth glorious and living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars.  So the pace at which he had to write in