There is not a melancholy strain in all his works; pensiveness was as deep a note as he could strike. He tried to defend the gay tone of his church music by saying that he had such a sense of the goodness of God that he could not be otherwise than joyful in thinking of him. This explanation was perfectly sincere, but Haydn was not enough of a philosopher to see the weak spot in this sort of aesthetics. Yet in spite of the obvious faults of Haydn’s mass style, looking at it from a historic point of view, it was a promise of advance, and not a sign of degeneracy. For it marked the introduction of genuine, even if misdirected feeling into worship music, in the place of dull conformity to routine. Haydn was far indeed from solving the problem of church music, but he helped to give new life to a form that showed danger of becoming atrophied. Two masses of world importance rise above the mediocrity of the Austrian school, like the towers of some Gothic cathedral above the monotonous tiled roofs of a mediaeval city,—the Requiem of Mozart and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven. The unfinished masterpiece of Mozart outsoars all comparison with the religious works of his youth, and as his farewell to the world he could impart to it a tone of pathos and exaltation which had hardly been known in the cold, objective treatment of the usual eighteenth-century mass. The hand of death was upon Mozart as he penned the immortal pages of the Requiem, and in this crisis he could feel that he was free from the dictation of fashion and precedent. This work is perhaps not all that we might look for in these solemn circumstances. Mozart’s exquisite genius was suited rather to the task, in which lies his true glory, of raising the old Italian opera to its highest possibilities of grace and truth to nature. He had not that depth of feeling and sweep of imagination which make the works of Bach, Händel, and Beethoven the sublimest expression of awe in view of the mysteries of life and death. Yet it is wholly free from the fripperies which disfigure the masses of Haydn, as well as from the dry scholasticism of much of Mozart’s own early religious work. Such movements as the Confutatis, the Recordare, and the Lacrimosa—movements inexpressibly earnest, consoling, and pathetic—gave evidence that a new and loftier spirit had entered the music of the Church.