d more unmanned
by illness, and his mental excitement fast becoming intolerable, when he
heard a low strain of music, from the Swedenborgian chapel, hard by. Its
first impression was one of solemnity and rest, and its first sense, in
his mind, was of relief. Perhaps it was the music of an evening meeting;
or it might be that the organist and choir had met for practice.
Whatever its purpose, it breathed through his heated fancy like a cool
and fragrant wind. It was vague and sweet and wandering at first,
straying on into a strain more mysterious and melancholy, but very
shadowy and subdued, and evoking the innocent and tender moods of early
youth before worldliness had hardened around his heart. Gradually, as he
listened to it, the fires in his brain were allayed, and all yielded to
a sense of coolness and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance
of utter rest, and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own
condition, or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the
music from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It
was still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and
strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably
mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his
depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened, rapt and
vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced sinking seemed to come to an
end, and with the feeling of one who had been descending for many hours,
and at length lay motionless at the bottom of a deep, dark chasm, he
heard the music fail and cease.

A pause, and then it rose again, blended with the solemn voices of the
choir, sublimed and dilated now, reaching him as though from weird night
gulfs of the upper air, and charged with an overmastering pathos as of
the lamentations of angels. In the dimness and silence, in the aroused
and exalted condition of his being, the strains seemed unearthly in
their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow, and their mournful and
dark significance was now for him. Working within him the impression of
vast, innumerable, fleeing shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the
ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early dreams and aims,
poured across the midnight of his soul, and under the streaming
melancholy of the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous treason. It
did not terrify or madden him; he listened to it rapt utterly as in some
deadening ether of