"If you let me be so," she replied, and drew away those folds, passing to her harp. Her hand, suddenly thrown upon the wires, whose resistance to embrace so sweet made all their music, caught the ear of little Josephine, who had been playing very innocently, for a prodigy, in the corner; and now she came slowly forwards, her doll in her arms, and stood about a yard from the harp, again putting up one finger to her lip, and giving me a glance across the intervening space. She looked, as she so peered, both singular and interesting in the blended curiosity and shyness that appertain to certain childhoods; but it seemed to me at that moment as if she were a strayed earthling into some picture of a scene in that unknown which men call heaven. For the harp and the form which appeared now to have grown to it--so inseparable are the elements of harmony, so intuitively they blend in meeting--were not a sight to suggest anything this side of death. All beauty is the gauge of immortality; and as I wondered at her utter loveliness, I became calm as immortality only permits and sanctions when on it our thoughts repose, for it our affections languish. Her arms still rested behind and before the strings as she tuned them; still her hair swept that cloud upon the softness of her cheek, toned the melancholy arch of her brow: but the deep rose-hues of her now drooping mantle, and the Italian azure of her robe, did not retrieve the fancy to any earthly apparition. They seemed but transparent and veil-like media through which the whiteness of light found way in colors that sheathed an unendurable naked lustre. I thought not in such words, but such thoughts were indeed mine; and while I was yet gazing,--dreaming, I should say, for I ever dream on beauty,--she played some long, low chords, attenuated golden thwarting threads of sound, and began forthwith to sing. She sang in German, and her song was a prayer for rest,--a Sunday song, as little Josephine said afterwards to me. But it might have been a lay of revenge, of war, or of woe, for all I heard that the words conveyed, as I could not exist except in the voice itself, or the spirit of which the voice was formed. I felt then that it is not in voice, it is not in cunning instrument, that the thing called music hides; it is the uncreate intelligence of tone that genius breathes into the created elements of sound. This girl's or angel's voice was not so sweet as intelligible, not so boundless as intense. It went straight into the brain, it stirred the soul without disturbing; the ear was unconscious as it entered that dim gallery, and rushed through it to the inward sympathetic spirit. The quality of the voice, too, as much pertained to that peculiar organization as certain scents pertain to particular flowers. It was as in the open air, not in the hothouse, that this foreign flower expanded, and breathed to the sun and wind its secrets. It was what dilettanti call