During these years of rich achievement the staunch qualities of his genius, his delicacy and accuracy of sensation, his sound common sense and wisdom, his breadth of imagination, joy, humor, sanity, and moral earnestness--these qualities radiate from his work as if it were illuminated by an inward phosphorescent glow. He creates or translates for the listener a whole world of truth which cannot be expressed by speech, canvas, or marble, but is only capable of being revealed in the realm of sound. The gaiety of his music is large and beneficent; its humor is that of the gods at play; its sorrow is never whimpering; its cry of passion is never that of earthly desire. ‘It is the gaiety which cries in the bird, rustles in the reeds, shines in spray; it is a voice as immediate as sunlight. Some new epithet must be invented for this music which narrates nothing, yet is epic; sings no articulate message, yet is lyric; moves to no distinguishable action, yet is already awake in the wide waters out of which a world is to awaken.’[63] The transition to the third period is even more definitely marked than that to the second. To it belong the pianoforte sonatas opus 101 to 111, the quartets opus 127 to 135, the Ninth Symphony, composed nearly eleven years after the eighth, and the mass in D--works built on even a grander scale than those of the second epoch. It would almost seem as if the form, enlarged and extended, ceased to exist as such and became a principle of growth, comparable only to the roots and fibres of a tree. The polyphony, quite unlike the old type of counterpoint, yet like that in that it is made up of distinct strands, is free and varied. Like the other artifices of technique, it serves only to repeat, intensify, or contrast the poetic idea. The usual medium of the orchestra is now insufficient to express his thought, therefore he adds a choral part for the full completion of the idea which had been germinating in his consciousness for more than twenty years. Moreover, these later works are touched with a mysticism almost beyond any words to define, as if the musician had ceased to speak in order to let the prophet have utterance. ‘He passes beyond the horizon of a mere singer and poet and touches upon the domain of the seer and the prophet; where, in unison with all genuine mystics and ethical teachers, he delivers a message of religious love and resignation, identification with the sufferings of all living creatures, depreciation of self, negation of personality, release from the world.’[64]