ce
stare you in the face, and all through an undue titillation of that part
of your sensorium that takes cognisance of musical sounds; a titillation
not to be subdued by endeavouring to direct your attention from it to
the very gravest of all subjects; nor propitiated even by audibly
chanting the offending strain, previously retiring into the furthest
corner of your coal-cellar, to prevent your unwilling profanity on
shocking the strictly conscientious ears of your household. This is
bad--and yet it is but a mild form of this morbid affection, which, in
its most intense degree, torments the sufferer from fever, (or one
stunned by some sudden and violent grief,) when certain sounds, words,
or tunes, accidentally determined, thrill through the head with the
steadiness and vehement action of the piston of a steam-engine--beat,
beat, beat!--every note seeming to fall on the excited brain like the
blow of a hammer; while, as the fever and pain increase, the more
rapidly and heavily do those torturing notes pursue their furious chase.
We well remember, under an attack of disorder in the neighbourhood of
the brain, causing severe suffering, lying--we know not how long, it
might be a thousand years for any thing we knew--singing over and over
again _in our mind_, for we were speechless with pain, the 148th psalm,
which we had just chanced to hear sung, in Brady and Tate's version, to
a new and somewhat peculiar tune. Oh, how those "dreadful whales" and
"glittering scales" did quaver and quiver in our poor head! Lying like a
log--for pain neither permitted us to stir nor groan--still rattled on,
hard and quick, the rumbling bass and shrill tenor of that most
inappropriately jubilant composition--"cherubim and seraphim," "fire,
hail, and snow," succeeding each other with a railway velocity that
there was no resisting; no sooner had we got to "stands ever fast," than
round again we went to the "boundless realms of joy," and so on, on,
on, through each dreary minute of those dreary hours, an infinity, or
perchance but twenty-four, according as time is computed by clocks or by
agonised human beings. It made a capital Purgatory; one which we have
even deemed every way adequate to those slight delinquencies of which we
may have been guilty, and which are appointed, as it is understood, to
be expiated in this way.

At times some simple air, or even a single chord of unusual, but
apparently obvious harmony, will haunt us with a peculiar