Manifestations of emotion, both in kind and degree, depend upon two things, our spiritual state or condition, and the nature of our surroundings. Passing over the first of these, it is evident that earth-surroundings greatly limit the expression of emotion; and when we observe the effect of a powerful current of this kind upon the physical tissues of the body, weakening and consuming them as by a flame, we see that the length of our stay here is involved in our ability to control our emotions. Not so in the Beyond, where our stay is without assignable limits, and where the pent-up emotions of a lifetime at last find vent, and pour themselves out as by flood-gates to the sea. And it is here that music plays its part in that wonder-world. For as ideas have each their appropriate form, so every emotion has a musical strain peculiar to it. And who can describe the healing power of music under a master's hand? Reading the mind and soul as an open book, and informing every tone with the vibrations of a perfect sympathy born of knowledge, he administers to the soul whose life has been a tragedy long-drawn-out, such throbbing waves of strength and consolation, himself remaining hidden, as seem to issue from the very stars, and drown the memory of that age-long pain in an ocean of oblivion. Ah! believe me, it is another world, where the powers of this one do not rule. CHAPTER XXVI. And yet, as I have indicated, it is possible to live so far below one's moral and spiritual possibilities, that the loss of life will seem the loss of heaven, and the men of power on earth whom one has envied will come to seem very gods, worthy of being worshipped. Such a delusion as this is in part due to the absence of a common time-element. Duration is measured only by the succession of various states of consciousness, and these change so rapidly under the influence of the vibratory intensity of the new life, that the events of a day lengthen it out until it seems like a year upon earth; and day and night being one in the Beyond, so far as activity is concerned, although they differ somewhat in magnetic conditions, when one of these year-long days is past, the spirit, glancing across into earth-life, at some money king, with thirty years of active life before him, can scarcely avoid endowing him with a kind of immortality, and may devote the fiery energies of the soul to building up the fortunes of such a one, with no higher object than that of keeping the mental balance and avoiding reflection.