such voluptuous phrases of the Vulgate as the following:  Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi. Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo. Vulnerasti cor meum, soror, sponsa mea. This was the period when Italy was ringing with the secular sweetnesses of Tasso’s Aminta and of Guarini’s Pastor fido; when the devotion of the cloister was becoming languorous and soft; when the cult of the Virgin was assuming the extravagant proportions satirized by Pascal; finally, when manners were affecting a tone of swooning piety blent with sensuous luxuriousness.  Palestrina’s setting of the Canticle and of the Hymn to Mary provided the public with music which, according to the taste of that epoch, transferred terrestrial emotions into the regions of paradisal bliss, and justified the definition of music as the Lamento dell’amore o la preghiera agli dei.  The great creator of a new ecclesiastical style, the ‘imitator of nature,’ as Vincenzo Galilei styled him, the ‘prince of music,’ as his epitaph proclaimed him, lent his genius to an art, vacillating between mundane sensuality and celestial rapture, which, however innocently developed by him in the sphere of music, was symptomatic of the most unhealthy tendencies of his race and age.  While singing these madrigals and these motetts the youth of either sex were no longer reminded, it is true, of tavern ditties or dance measures.  But the emotions of luxurious delight or passionate ecstasy deep in their own natures were drawn forth, and sanctified by application to the language of effeminate devotion.

I have dwelt upon these two sets of compositions, rather than upon the masses of strictly and severely ecclesiastical music which Palestrina produced with inexhaustible industry, partly because they appear to have been extraordinarily popular, and partly because they illustrate those tendencies in art and manners which the sentimental school of Bolognese painters attempted to embody.  They belong to that religious sphere which the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of their prescribed discipline.  These considerations are not merely irrelevant.  The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch.  What Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of demarcation between pious and profane expression.  He taught music to utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.