For a long while these efforts remained tentative and inchoate, because the men who made them were neither very clearly aware what they were trying to do, nor acquainted with technical means for doing it. But the scheme of treating dances as the basis of instrumental movements, the chief expression of which was that of energy, vitality, the more active and effervescent emotions, was afterwards elaborated by more trained masters, and eventually bore fruit in the innumerable suites and partitas, or bundles of dances, of the eighteenth century, and in the symphonic minuet and scherzo. The mere fact that composers of the seventeenth century paid respectful attention to the popular minstrelsy, which had been treated with such scant courtesy by ecclesiastical masters, and that they so persistently imitated its methods, is in itself strong testimony to the change of attitude that was taking place. The songs and dances of the people are the most spontaneous expressions of purely personal feeling in the entire range of music. They were upwellings of primitive emotion, as instinctive and unsophisticated as the cries and gestures from which they were developed. And for these reasons they were norms of the proper expression of naïve feeling in music--all music, so far as it aims to express personal feeling at all, makes use of the melodic phrases derived from the cry, and of the dance-rhythms derived from the gesture. Consequently, so soon as musical artists became inspired with the new ideal of personal expression, they turned to the popular music for inspiration and methods. Thus in all ways the tendency of music in the seventeenth century was toward a fuller, more varied, and more poignant emotional expressiveness. Men were willing to forego without a murmur all the advantages of the perfected technique of the earlier choral age, and to trust themselves on the pathless sea of the New Music, because, like the pilgrims who in the same century left European civilization behind them to seek a larger if more difficult life in an uncharted country, they were inspired by a love of the human spirit in its fullness and freedom. All arbitrary limitations and denials of it, no matter how hallowed by long usage, were to them not religious, but sacrilegious. To them, as to Terence, “nothing human was alien”; and they might have cried, with Whitman, to every human trait, however trivial, ignoble, or commonplace, “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”