and His young children whom in Judea, once and forever, He had blessed, though they _must_ pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The hint from the Litany, the fragment from the clouds, the pictures on the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And often-times in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce, yet melodious, over the voices of the choir--high in arches when it rose, seeming to surmount and over-ride the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm of music into unity--sometimes I also seemed to rise and to walk triumphantly upon those clouds, which so recently I had looked up to as mementoes of prostrate sorrow. Yes; sometimes, under the transfigurations of music, I felt of grief itself, as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief." The next (which was the _second_) chapter of my childish experience, formed that sort of fierce and fantastic contradiction to the first, which might seem to move in obedience to some incarnate principle of malicious pantomime. A spirit of love, and a spirit of rest, as if breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had vanished, idiocy and the torpor of despondency were really creeping stealthily over my faculties, and strangling their energies, what better change for me than the necessity (else how miserable!) of fighting, wrangling, struggling, without pause, or promise of pause, from day to day, or even from year to year? "If," as my good angel might have said to me, "thou art moving on a line of utter ruin, from mere palsy of one great vital force, and if that loss is past all restoration, then kindle a new supplementary life by such means as are now possible--by the agitations, for instance, of strife and conflict"--yes, possible, on the wide stage of the world, and for people who should be free agents enough to _make_ enemies, in case they failed to find them; but for a child, not seven years old, to whom his medical advisers should prescribe a course of hatred, or continued hostilities, by way of tonics, in what quarter was _he_ to look out for such luxuries? Who would condescend to officiate as _enemy_ to a child! And yet, as regarded my own particular case, had I breathed out any such querulous demand, that same Harlequin Mephistopheles might