e spiritual director of
Palestrina, and appointed him composer to his devout confraternity. For
the use of that society the master wrote a series of _Arie Divote_ on
Italian words. They were meant to be sung by the members, and to
supersede the old usages of Laud-music, which had chiefly consisted in
adapting popular street-tunes to sacred words.[211]

[Footnote 211: See _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. iv. pp. 263, 305.]

To the same connection with the Oratory we owe one of the most
remarkable series of Palestrina's compositions. These were written upon
the words of an Italian Canzone in thirty octave stanzas, addressed as a
prayer to the Virgin. Palestrina set each stanza, after the fashion of a
Madrigal, to different melodies; and the whole work proved a manual of
devotional music, in the purest artistic taste, and the most delicately
sentimental key of feeling. Together with this collection of spiritual
songs should be mentioned Palestrina's setting of passages from the Song
of Solomon in a series of motetts; which were dedicated to Gregory
XIII., in 1584. They had an enormous success. Ten editions between that
date and 1650 were poured out from the presses of Rome and Venice, to
satisfy the impatience of thousands who desired to feed upon 'the nectar
of their sweetness.' Palestrina chose for the motives of his
compositions such voluptuous phrases of the Vulgate as the following:
_Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi._ _Fulcite me floribus, stipate
me malis, quia amore langueo._ _Vulnerasti cor meum, soror, sponsa mea._
This was the period when Italy was ringing with the secular sweetnesses
of Tasso's _Aminta_ and of Guarini's _Pastor fido_; when the devotion of
the cloister was becoming languorous and soft; when the cult of the
Virgin was assuming the extravagant proportions satirized by Pascal;
finally, when manners were affecting a tone of swooning piety blent with
sensuous luxuriousness. Palestrina's setting of the Canticle and of the
Hymn to Mary provided the public with music which, according to the
taste of that epoch, transferred terrestrial emotions into the regions
of paradisal bliss, and justified the definition of music as the
_Lamento dell'amore o la preghiera agli dei_. The great creator of a new
ecclesiastical style, the 'imitator of nature,' as Vincenzo Galilei
styled him, the 'prince of music,' as his epitaph proclaimed him, lent
his genius to an art, vacillating between mundane sensuality and
celest