d to leap back into
the past, to dally there now with laughter, now with tears. Her changing
moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman excited and happy over
her lover's return.

But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the
marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept over the
soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift transition from
the major to the minor, the organist told her hearer of her present lot.
She gave the story of long melancholy broodings, of the slow course
of her moral malady. How day by day she deadened the senses, how every
night cut off one more thought, how her heart was slowly reduced
to ashes. The sadness deepened shade after shade through languid
modulations, and in a little while the echoes were pouring out a torrent
of grief. Then on a sudden, high notes rang out like the voices of
angels singing together, as if to tell the lost but not forgotten lover
that their spirits now could only meet in heaven. Pathetic hope! Then
followed the _Amen_. No more joy, no more tears in the air, no sadness,
no regrets. The _Amen_ was the return to God. The final chord was deep,
solemn, even terrible; for the last rumblings of the bass sent a shiver
through the audience that raised the hair on their heads; the nun shook
out her veiling of crepe, and seemed to sink again into the grave from
which she had risen for a moment. Slowly the reverberations died away;
it seemed as if the church, but now so full of light, had returned to
thick darkness.

The General had been caught up and borne swiftly away by this
strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight from
beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the imagery of
that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep and far. For
him, as for the sister, the poem meant future, present, and past. Is
not music, and even opera music, a sort of text, which a susceptible
or poetic temper, or a sore and stricken heart, may expand as memories
shall determine? If a musician must needs have the heart of a poet, must
not the listener too be in a manner a poet and a lover to hear all that
lies in great music? Religion, love, and music--what are they but a
threefold expression of the same fact, of that craving for expansion
which stirs in every noble soul. And these three forms of poetry ascend
to God, in whom all passion on earth finds its end. Wherefore the holy
human trinity finds a pl