And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not merely a series of tones having that sort of elementary consecutiveness which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a series of tones divided up into several definite segments which in someway balance, complement, and complete one another. The first phrase of “Yankee Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it does not satisfy our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase, equal to it in length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third phrase, twice as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a complete period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord structure and inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance, response, symmetry--that recognizable recurrence, to use the most general term possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent intoning, without repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more “tune” than prose is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting our own habits of thought confuse our understanding of an unfamiliar type of art. The truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,” in the modern sense of the word. He lived and wrote before musical evolution had given the world that principle of metrical structure so essential to modern music; and his style, therefore, lacks definite meter, lacks all rhythm save that vague one superposed upon it by his Latin prose text. His music, devoid of any regular segmental division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as massive and majestic as the “Religio Medici.”