Bach wrapped in the fire of passionate affirmation. If the former remains in grimmest earth, the latter, for all the vehement clutching at the divine garment-hem in the Kyrie, for all the deathly rigour of the Crucifixus, is completely within the inmost circle of heaven. The pang of mortal life is present in the Mass only as it appears in the moments of intensest fulfilment when night is accepted in deepest gratitude with day for the sake of the inestimable boon of existence. On the wings of the great-arched, ecstatic fugal choruses we are carried out beyond pain and pleasure and set naked breast to breast with the labouring divinity. The proud brass and grandiose drums, the great sky-floating edifices of sound that are like great golden-mosaicked San Marcos rising high in the air, seem shaped out of stuff dragged from the very depths of the human heart, and offered in great lordly clusters to the light. Gorgeous masterly movements, each the amazing and powerful development of simple material, are set with a sort of quenchless liberality one beside the other. Other musicians, some of the greatest, might have sunk back exhausted after composing two or three such; Bach continues, and sets soaring climax upon climax. At intervals, between some of the great choral movements, like flowering bushes between granite crags, a solo air with exquisitely intricate accompaniment of reed or strings, is set; and the two grandeurs seem to increase for the opposition of character. If ever work brought man close to the burning source of creation, it is this mass.
It was no baroque or rococo town that lay about the church in which these wondrous works were performed. It was an American city, a place not really distinguished from a score of others. It might have been Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, Easton or some Hudson River town, that lay about the memorial church, so little did the environment do to make particularly free the recipient mind. For all the bits of Moravian old-worldliness in ancient schools and walls that makes one feel something almost more Canadian than American, at certain turnings amid the smoky air of Bethlehem, the place does not depart essentially from the type of second-class city in the United States. If it has its mountainy walls, its pretty hillside campus, and its bits of blazer-colour supplied by Lehigh students lounging feet up on the porches of fraternity houses, it has also its river-front grim with the brutal bulks and chimneys of mills, its trolley lines running past numberless blocks of genteel dreary houses
