winged car, in mid air,
throwing out with a free gesture the reins attached to the bodies of a
flight of cranes; the only symbol of his destination a crescent moon,
shining in dark skies beyond him. That picture had always seemed to
Hugh a parable of music, that it gave one power to fly upon the regions
of the upper air, to use the wings of the morning.

And yet, if one analysed it, what a totally inexplicable pleasure it
was. Part of it, the orderly and rhythmical beat of metre, such as
comes from striking the fingers on the table, or tapping the foot upon
the floor; how deep lay the instinct to bring into strict sequence,
where it was possible, the mechanical movements of nature, the creaking
of the boughs of trees, the drip of water from a fountain-lip, the beat
of rolling wheels, the recurrent song of the thrush on the high tree;
and then there came in the finer sense of intricate vibration. The
lower notes of great organ-pipes had little indeed but a harsh roar,
that throbbed in the leaded casements of the church; but climbing
upwards they took shape in the delicate noises, the sounds and sweet
airs of which Prospero's magic isle was full. And yet the rapture of
it was inexpressible in words. Sometimes those airy flights of notes
seemed to stimulate in some incomprehensible way the deepest emotions
of the human spirit; not indeed the intellectual and moral emotions,
but the primal and elemental desires and woes of the heart.

Hugh could hardly say in what region of the soul this all took place.
It seemed indeed the purest of all emotions, for the mind lost itself
in a delight which hardly even seemed to be sensuous at all, because,
in the case of other arts, one was conscious of pleasure, conscious of
perception, of mingling identity with the thing seen or perceived; but
in music one was rapt almost out of mortality, in a kind of bodiless
joy.

One of Hugh's causes of dissatisfaction with the education he had
received was that, though he had a considerable musical gift, he had
never been taught to play any musical instrument. Partly indolence and
partly lack of opportunity had prevented him from attaining any measure
of skill by his own exertions, though he had once worked a little, very
fitfully, at the theory of music, and had obtained just enough
knowledge of the composition of chords to give him an intelligent
pleasure in disentangling the elements of simple progressions. Another
trifling physical cha