scarcely a trace: that belonged to an era of experiments. The strongest
and most original of his immediate predecessors, Pelham Humphries,
influenced him chiefly by showing 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