at one
place where the strings suddenly cease and there comes a peculiar
chromatic waft of wind instruments, like a ghostly voice rushing
across. I have never felt anything like it; it swept one right away,
and gave one a sense of deep ineffable satisfaction. I shall always
feel _for the future_ that there is an existent region, _into which
I have now actually penetrated_, in which that entire satisfaction
is possible, a fact which I have always hitherto doubted. It is
like an initiation.

"But I can not bear the 'Tannhauser;' it seems to paint with a
fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to
speak, of sensuality. I feel after it as if I had been yielding to
a luscious temptation; unnerved, not inspired."

In another letter he writes, "Music is the most hopeful of the arts;
she does not hint only, like other expressions of beauty--she takes
you straight into a world of peace, a world where law and beauty are
the same, and where an ordered discord, that is discord working by
definite laws, is the origin of the keenest pleasure."

I remember, during the one London season which he subsequently went
through, his settling himself at a Richter concert next me with an
air of delight upon his face. "Now," he said, "let us try and
remember for an hour or two that we have souls."

CHAPTER III

I must here record one curious circumstance which I have never
explained even to my own satisfaction.

He had been at Cambridge about two years, when, in the common consent
of all his friends, his habits and behaviour seemed to undergo a
complete and radical change.

I have never discovered what the incident was that occasioned this
change; all I know is that suddenly, for several weeks, his geniality
of manner and speech, his hilarity, his cheerfulness, entirely
disappeared; a curious look of haunting sadness, not defined, but
vague, came over his face; and though he gradually returned to his
old ways, yet I am conscious myself, and others would support me in
this, that he was never quite the same again; he was no longer young.

The only two traces that I can discover in his journals, or letters,
or elsewhere, of the facts are these.

He always in later diaries vaguely alludes to a certain event which
changed his view of things in general; "ever since," "since that
November," "for now nearly five years I have felt." These and similar
phrases constantly occur in his diary. I will speak in a moment