of them are on Handel’s highest level, and Handel’s highest level has never been reached by any other composer.  His choruses are equalled by Bach’s, his dramatic strokes by Gluck’s, his instrumental movements by Bach’s and perhaps Lulli’s; but the coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, and Wagner has only served to show that he is the greatest song-writer the world has known or is likely to know.  Even Mozart never quite attained that union of miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and stress excused.  “Faith displays her rosy wing” is an absolutely perfect instance of a Handel song.  Were not the thing done, one might believe it impossible to express with such simplicity—­four sombre minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings—­the alternations of trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the human soul in extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in the thought that this was the worst.  As astounding as this is the quality of light and freshness of atmosphere with which Handel imbues such songs as “Clouds o’ertake the brightest day” and “Crystal streams in murmurs flowing”; and the tenderness of “Would custom bid,” with the almost divine refrain, “I then had called thee mine,” might surprise us, coming as it does from such a giant, did we not know that tenderness is always a characteristic of the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack of generous feeling observable in (say) our London composers to-day stamp them more unmistakably than does their music as small composers.  If the poor fellows knew what they were about, they would at least conceal the littlenesses that show they are destined never to do work of the first order.  The composer of the “Rex tremendae” (in the Requiem) wrote “Dove sono,” Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries’ Ride and the motherhood theme in “Siegfried,” Handel “Worthy is the Lamb” and “Waft her, angels”; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive structure.  And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel comes very close to him.  The world may, though not probably, tire of all but his grandest choruses, while his songs will always be sung as lovely expressions of the finest human feeling.