d drinking in and pouring out the full stream of divine
and never-failing love and gratitude.

Reader, did you ever listen to the sympathetic vibrations of a musical
string? Place in the corner of your room a guitar--it matters not if it
have but a single string, that alone is sufficient for the
experiment--then, sitting at some distance from it, sing, shout, or play
upon some loud-toned instrument, or, beginning at the foot of the
chromatic scale, sound, round and full, each semitone in succession and
at separate intervals. The instrument is mute to every note until you
strike the one to which the guitar string is attuned; then indeed, the
spirit of melody imprisoned within the musical string recognizes its
kindred sound, and springs sweetly forth to meet it. You pause, and a
low, sweet strain sighs softly through the room, as if a zephyr had
swept the string, dying gently away like the faintest breathing of the
evening breeze. Repeat the note, and louder than at first, and again its
counterpart replies, swelling higher than before, as if in gentle
remonstrance that you should deem it necessary to call again to that
which has already replied.

Even so it is with these hidden faculties or susceptibilities of which I
have been speaking. In the notes of witching music, in the numbers of
poesy, in the sight of beauty, either of nature or of art, either
aesthetic or moral, these silent powers recognize a faint approximation
to that beauty with which they will have to do in that world where they
shall be called into action: they too recognize the kindred spirit, and,
springing forward to meet it, vibrate in unison with the chord. But yet,
restrained by their prison of clay, bound down by the immutable law
which bids them wait their time, their great deep is but troubled, and
while, from their swaying and surging, a delicious emotion spreads over
the soul, filling the whole being with indescribable joy, it is an
emotion which we cannot fathom, vague and undefined, at which we wonder
even while we enjoy. To each and all of us the doors of heaven are
closed for the present; we never have heard the songs of the celestial
spheres, and how should we recognize their echo here on earth, even
though that echo is swelling through our own hearts? And the sadness and
yearning which such emotions invariably produce, may they not be the
yearning for heaven's supernal beauty, and sadness for the chains which
bar us from its full realizati