violin, and a fearful groan and a sob, such as was never heard upon
earth before, nor will be perhaps heard upon earth again, unless in
the valley of Jehoshaphat, when the colossal trumpets of doom shall
ring out, and the naked corpses shall crawl forth from the grave to
abide their fate. But the agonized violinist suddenly made one
stroke of the bow, such a mad, despairing stroke, that his chains
fell rattling from him, and his mysterious assistant and the other
foul, mocking forms vanished.

At this moment my neighbor, the furrier, said, "A pity, a pity! a
string has snapped--that comes from constant pizzicato."

Had a string of the violin really snapped? I do not know. I only
observed the alternation in the sounds, and Paganini and his
surroundings seemed to me again suddenly changed. I could scarcely
recognize him in the monk's brown dress, which concealed rather
than clothed him. With savage countenance half-hid by the cowl,
waist girt with a cord, and bare feet, Paganini stood, a solitary
defiant figure, on a rocky prominence by the sea, and played his
violin. But the sea became red and redder, and the sky grew paler,
till at last the surging water looked like bright, scarlet blood,
and the sky above became of a ghastly corpse-like pallor, and the
stars came out large and threatening; and those stars were
black--black as glooming coal. But the tones of the violin grew
ever more stormy and defiant, and the eyes of the terrible player
sparkled with such a scornful lust of destruction, and his thin
lips moved with such a horrible haste, that it seemed as if he
murmured some old accursed charms to conjure the storm and loose
the evil spirits that lie imprisoned in the abysses of the sea.
Often, when he stretched his long, thin arm from the broad monk's
sleeve, and swept the air with his bow, he seemed like some
sorcerer who commands the elements with his magic wand; and then
there was a wild wailing from the depth of the sea, and the
horrible waves of blood sprang up so fiercely that they almost
besprinkled the pale sky and the black stars with their red foam.
There was a wailing and a shrieking and a crashing, as if the world
was falling into fragments, and ever more stubbornly the monk
played his violin. He seemed as if by the power of viol