et
and wandering at first, straying on into a strain more mysterious and
melancholy, but very shadowy and subdued, and evoking the innocent
and tender moods of early youth before worldliness had hardened
around his heart. Gradually, as he listened to it, the fires in
his brain were allayed, and all yielded to a sense of coolness
and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance of utter rest,
and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own condition,
or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music from
its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was
still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and
strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably
mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in
his depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened,
rapt and vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced sinking seemed
to come to an end, and with the feeling of one who had been descending
for many hours, and at length lay motionless at the bottom of a
deep, dark chasm, he heard the music fail and cease.

A pause, and then it rose again, blended with the solemn voices
of the choir, sublimed and dilated now, reaching him as though
from weird night gulfs of the upper air, and charged with an
overmastering pathos as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness
and silence, in the aroused and exalted condition of his being, the
strains seemed unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur
of sorrow, and their mournful and dark significance was now for
him. Working within him the impression of vast, innumerable fleeing
shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an
existence fallen from its early dreams and aims, poured across
the midnight of his soul, and under the streaming melancholy of
the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous treason. It did not
terrify or madden him; he listened to it rapt utterly as in some
deadening ether of dream; yet feeling to his inmost core all its
powerful grief and accusation, and quietly aghast at the sinister
consciousness it gave him. Still it swelled, gathering and sounding
on into yet mightier pathos, till all at once it darkened and spread
wide in wild despair, and aspiring again into a pealing agony of
supplication, quivered and died away in a low and funereal sigh.

The tears streamed suddenly upon his face; his soul lightened and
turned dark within him; and, as on