In old-fashioned proverbial guise Werckmeister shows us quite well what was expected from this class of stops; slow of speech, of a sharp, cutting timbre, they would not have blended with the foundation stops combined with the mixtures--an _ensemble_ which lends extraordinary harmonic fulness to the polyphony when the combinations are judiciously made. The reeds were fitted rather to voice a serious and quiet melody, as a solo. Thanks to their sometimes strange tones, which seem, as Goethe said, to herald the advent of past centuries, echoes of supernatural voices, where the human voice, with its individual character, would lose the power of expression--the antique chorale-melody is illuminated, detached from the accompaniment, and comes as from on high; it is the gold and scarlet illumination of the missals, whereon the sacred words are brought into relief, themselves devoid of ornament, in their regular lines, but interlaced by ingenious arabesques of a softer tone, almost effaced by the brightness of the whole. One direction of Bach's proves that he adopted this usage: in No. 2 of the _Orgelbüchlein_ (_Gottes Sohn ist kommen_) the chorale is played upon the eight-foot trumpet in the pedal; the chorale _In Dulci Jubilo_, composed about the same time, undoubtedly demands the same registration. It is well known that these two chorales possess a pedal-part extending unusually high (_F_ and _F_ sharp); this was the Cöthen pedal. In playing them upon an ordinary instrument, Bach undoubtedly played the pedal an octave lower, with a four-foot register. The organs of that period usually contained a four-foot reed-stop on the pedal, called a Cornet (which must not be confounded with the mixture of that name), or a _Chalumeau_ (_Schalmey_), sometimes even of two feet. This use of stops of a higher pitch in the pedal was an old tradition; Samuel Scheidt availed himself of them in playing the chorale, and we find them expressly called for in several of six chorales published at Zella by Schübler, with the Bach annotations.[158] [Footnote 158: _Sechs Choräle von verschiedener Art auf einer Orgel mit 2 Clavieren und Pedal vorzuspielen, verfertiget von Johann Sebastian Bach, königl. Pohln. und Churf. Sächs. Hoff-Compositeur, Capellm. und Direct. Chor. Mus. Lips. In Verlegung Joh. Georg Schüblers zu Zella am Thüringer Wald._