y clouds sailing over the azure depths of the
sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately under
the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into a
vision of beds with white lawny curtains; and in the beds lay sick
children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping
clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly
release them from their pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to
rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended into the chambers
of the air; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, that he and
his young children whom in Judea, once and for ever, he had blessed,
though they _must_ pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation,
might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These
visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my
feelings. The hint from the Litany, the fragment from the clouds, those
and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the
tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in
anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,
fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir--when it rose high in
arches, as might seem, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal
parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into
unity--sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which so
recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow, and even as
ministers of sorrow in its creations; yes, sometimes under the
transfigurations of music I felt[11] of grief itself as a fiery chariot
for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief.

I point so often to the feelings, the ideas, or the ceremonies of
religion, because there never yet was profound grief nor profound
philosophy which did not inosculate at many points with profound religion.
But I request the reader to understand, that of all things I was not, and
could not have been, a child trained to _talk_ of religion, least of all
to talk of it controversially or polemically. Dreadful is the picture,
which in books we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines of
Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries and
distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. And it has often struck me
with amazement, that the two things which God made most beautiful among
his works, viz. infancy