A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades of meaning save those which are very intense, and very highly and sharply contrasted, led me to divide the poem into the eight paragraphs or movements which it presents, and make these vividly opposed to each other in sentiment. Thus the first movement is reflection, measured and sober: this suddenly changes into the _agitato_ of the second: this agitato, culminating in the unison shout "_No! It shall not be_," yields in the third movement to the _pianissimo_ and meager effect of the skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc.: this _pianissimo_ in the fourth movement is turned into a climax of the wars of armies and of faiths, again ending in the shout, "No!" etc.: the fifth movement opposes this with a _whispered_ chorus--Huguenots whispering _Yea_, etc.: the sixth opposes again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc.: the seventh opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song; and the last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad full chorus of measured and firm sentiment. The metrical forms were selected purely with reference to their descriptive nature: the four trochaic feet of the opening strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outre and bizarre and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines: the swift action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes the time _before_ we were a real nation) in meters which are as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic meter--which is the genius of English words--as soon as the Nation becomes secure and firm. My business as member of the orchestra for three years having caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had often been struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly effects of that part of the bassoon register so well known to students of Berlioz and Meyerbeer--by the use of the syllable _ee_ sung by a chorus. With this view I filled the ghostly Jamestown stanza with _ee_'s and would have put in more if I could have found them appropriate to the sense.[128] No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition." It explains much of Lanier's work. VI