is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and
the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails
to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love;
he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in
the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things,
understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being
deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.

Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said
was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made
eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress,
the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now
the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and
enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once
been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present
by the brightness of visions.

He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side
of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black
frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a
needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could
see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed,
or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden
become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning,
always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening
along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he
remembered--it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the
myrtle wreath on her head--gave the impulse to the stirring _presto_ in
the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he sketched on awakening
from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect
repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.

But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these
conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When
the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay
nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from
himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping
melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled f