If Handel's works have for later generations become a source of joy and delight to a very different social class, it is because they are the musical equivalents of those palaces and gardens of Handel's day which are now national monuments and open to all comers. We walk beneath their colonnades, peopling them in imagination with the gracious and stately figures of the past; and from the museum of memory there arise the unheard strains of Handel's music:
Hark! the heavenly sphere turns round,
And silence now is drown'd,
In ecstasy of sound!
How on a sudden the still air is charm'd,
As if all harmony were just alarm'd
And every soul with transport fill'd!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mainwaring, J.: Memoirs of the Life of the Late G. F. Handel. London. 1760.
Burney, Charles: A General History of Music. London. 1776-89.
Burney, Charles: An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster Abbey, etc. London. 1785.
Hawkins, Sir John: A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. London. 1776.
Coxe, W.: Anecdotes of G. F. Handel and Y. C. Smith. London. 1799.