laughter; they were capricious as
the merriment of a coquette. Then they merged into a sweet and warbling
cadence--a cadence of inimitable tenderness, the very suavity of which
was rendered more piquant by its lavish variations. The measure changed,
with an abrupt fling of the treble-hand: it gushed into an air quaint
and sprightly as the dance of Puck--comic--odd--sparkling on the ear
like zig-zags: it threw out a shower of notes; it was the voice of
agility and merriment; it was grotesque and fitful, droll in its absurd
confusion, and yet nimble, in its amazing ingenuity. Gradually, however,
the humorous movement resolved itself into a strain of preternatural
wildness--a strain that made the blood curdle, and the flesh creep, and
the nerves shudder. It abounded with dark and goblin passages; it was
the whirlwind blowing among the crags of the Jungfrau, and swarming with
the forms and cries of the witches of the Walpurgis; it was Eurydice,
traversing the corridors of hell; it was midnight over the wilderness,
with the clouds drifting before the moon; it was a hurricane on the deep
sea; it was every thing horrible, wierdlike, and tumultuous. And through
the very fury of these passages there would start tones of ravishing and
gentle beauty--the incense of an adoring heart wafted to the black
heavens through the lightnings and lamentations of Nineveh. Again the
musician changed the purpose of his improvisation; it was no longer
dismal and appalling, it was pathetic. The instrument became, as it
were, the organ of sadness, it became eloquent with an inarticulate wo;
it was a breast bursting with affliction, a voice broken with sorrow, a
soul dissolving with emotions. Then the variable harmonies rose from
pensiveness into frenzy, from frenzy into the noise and the shocks of a
great battle; they swelled to the din of contending armies, to the storm
and vicissitudes of warlike deeds, and soared at last into a paean such
as that of victorious legions when--

"Gaily to glory they come,
Like a king in his pomp,
To the blast of the tromp,
And the roar of the mighty drum!"

As the triumphant tones of the instrument rolled up from its recesses,
and filled the apartment with a torrent of majestic sounds, as the
musician swayed to and fro in the enthusiasm of his sublime
inspirations, and enhanced the divine symphony by the crash of many
thrilling and abrupt discords, the Rosicrucian gazed with awe upon the
respon