ectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The
margins of the windows were rich in storied glass; through the deep
purples and crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly
illumination mingling with the earthly emblazonries of what is grandest
in man. _There_ were the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the
glories of earth, out of celestial love to man. _There_ were the martyrs
that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through torments,
and through armies of fierce, insulting faces. _There_ were the saints
that, under intolerable pangs, had glorified God by meek submission to
his will. And all the time, while this tumult of sublime memorials held
on as the deep chords of some accompaniment in the bass, I saw through
the wide central field of the window, where the glass was _un_colored,
white fleecy 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, in order that He
and His young children whom in Judea, once and forever, 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, the
pictures on the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the
blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And
often-times in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast
columns of sound, fierce, yet melodious, over the voices of the
choir--high in arches when it rose, seeming to surmount and over-ride
the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the
total storm of music into unity--sometimes I also seemed to rise and to
walk triumphantly upon those clouds, which so recently I had looked up
to as mementoes of prostrate sorrow. Yes; sometimes, under the
transfigurations