not seen_.'

"I walked round the Tower, and found a third door facing the river; and
over that was written:

"'_Turris scientiae_.'

"But all these doors were now closed; nor indeed, had they been open,
should I have felt any inclination to renew the experience from which
I had escaped. I therefore turned away sadly enough and made my way
along the bank towards the second tower.

"Over the door of this was written in the same language as before:

"'_I am the Ear; come into me and hear_.'

"The door was open, and I went in, this time with some apprehension,
but with still more curiosity and hope. No sooner was I within than I
was overwhelmed by an experience analogous to that which had greeted
me in the Tower of Sight, but even more ravishingly sweet. This time
what I felt was the sensation of pure sound: sound, not merely heard,
but, as before in the case of light, apprehended at once by every
avenue of sense, and folding and sustaining, as it seemed, my whole
being in a clear and buoyant element of tone. It was only by degrees
that out of this absolute essence of sheer sound distinctions of
rhythm and pitch began to appear, and to assume definite musical form.
The theme at first was pastoral and sweet, suggestive of rustling
grasses and murmuring reeds, interwoven with which was an exquisite
lilting tune, the song of the souls as they sped down the river.
But one by one other elements crept into the strain; it increased in
volume and variety of tone, in complexity of rhythm and tune, till it
grew at length into a symphony so august, so solemn, and so profound,
that there is nothing I know of in our music here to which I can fitly
compare it. It reminded me, however, of Wagner more than of any other
composer, in the richness of its colour, the insistence and force of
its rhythms, its fragments of ineffable melody, and above all, its
endless chromatic sequences, for ever suggesting but never actually
reaching the full close which I knew not whether most to dread or
to desire. The music itself was wonderful enough; but more wonderful
still was my clear perception, while I listened, that what was being
presented to me now through the medium of sound was precisely the same
world which I had seen from the Tower of Sight. Every phenomenon, and
sequence of phenomena, which I had witnessed there, I recognized now,
in appropriate musical form. The foundation of all was a great basal
rhythm, given out on something that