In a moment they had crashed together and out of the collision came a mist of fire, that soon by whirling in space became again another and a larger sphere of glowing vapour. How impressive was this reincarnation of worlds! Deeper and deeper the scene sank into the spirit, as the electric thrill which accompanied the earlier steps of the process passed into dim-echoing music, translating all we saw into sounds. A singular feature of their music was that it was never produced in the same room in which it was to be listened to. The machinery and the orchestra drown by their clack and clamour the soft footfalls of harmony that are the only true spirit of music; this was their reason. They had a contrivance in every large room, a huge-mouthed tube by which inflowing music was softened or strengthened and which could if need be raise a whisper into a thunder-peal; in this was a series of keys or stops, by which any sound coming through it could be modulated. One key could make the apparatus soundproof by filling its throat with a pledget of a peculiar fibrous metal they had. One series could wring out the harshness of any sound till it became soft as a much-reverberated echo. A second magnified any sound, however soft, to the required loudness and volume, and the whole was controlled by a minute key-board which could be held in the hand and moved to any part of the room. In this vast auditorium I could not see where the key-board was managed; but he must have been a poet-musician who manipulated it, so delicately did the volume of sound adapt itself to the mood of those who watched the growth and decay of worlds. Now it swelled with the collision into thunderous harmony; again as a crisis approached in the tragedy it fell to the low music of far-echoing nature-sounds. At times this marvellous opera of universes died away to my hearing; yet my neighbours lay in trance as if still catching harmonies that mastered the soul. I knew nothing but the vague electric thrill that passes through the nature at some great thought. Harmonies as colossal touched their electric sense as those which before had come through their hearing. I longed to follow them into those spheres of melodious being that were still beyond me. I came afterwards to know the astronomic family that had arranged these wonderful effects upon the soul through the various senses, and I saw the mechanism by which they were contrived. Its simplicity was what struck me most, when I remembered how complicated were the sensuous modes of appeal to the spirit. Out of innumerable sonoscripts and electrographs impressed by the world of stars upon their records, they had selected those that would fit together and raise the souls of the listeners to the sublimity of seeing the infinite cosmos.