None can know who has not felt--none feel who has not heard--the spell of those haunting services in the land of Luther! The chorale so grave and powerful, with its interpieces so light and florid, like slender fretworks on a marble shrine,--the unisonous pause, the antiphonal repose, the deep sense of worship stirred by the sense of sound. From that Sunday I always went with Aronach, unbidden, but unforbidden; and as I learned to be very expert in stopping, I substituted very speedily the functionary who had performed the office before my advent. FOOTNOTE: [14] There is no question but that Starwood Burney is intended for a portrait of Sterndale Bennett. Mendelssohn was his friend from boyhood, and aided him greatly with his suggestions, though it is doubtful whether Bennett ever studied with him. It was through Mendelssohn's influence that he brought out Bach's music in London. He was also a pupil of the Leipsic Conservatory. CHAPTER XXVII. It cannot be supposed that I forgot my home, or that I failed to institute an immediate correspondence, which was thus checked in the bud. Aronach, finding me one night, after we had all retired, with my little ink-bottle on the floor and myself outsprawled writing upon my knees close into my lamp, very coolly carried my sheet, pen, and ink away, and informed me that he never permitted his pupils to write home at all, or to write anything except what he set them to do. I should have revolted outright against this restriction but for a saving discovery I made on the morrow,--that our master himself dismissed from his own hand a bulletin of our health and record of our progress once a month. Precious specimens, no doubt, they were, these, of hard-hearted fact! Neither were we allowed to receive letters ourselves from home. Only simple communications were permitted to himself; and the effect of this rule, so autocratic, was desperately painful upon me at first. I hungered for some sweet morsel of English, served up in English character; I wanted to hear more than that all were well; and as for Lenhart Davy, had not my love informed my memory, I should have forgotten him altogether. But it was very soon I began to realize that this judicious interdiction lent a tonic bitterness to my life. I was completely abstracted, and upon that passage of my inwardly eventful history I can never glance back without a quiet tear or two; it was heavenly in its unabsolved and absolute serenity. It was the one mood that befitted a growing heart too apt to burn,--a busy brain too apt to vision,--if that head and heart were ever to be raised from the valley of material life into the mountain heights of art. I fear my remembrances are dull just here, for the glory that touched them was of the moment, and too subtle to be retrieved; but it is impossible not just to remind myself of them before returning to my adventure-maze.