“In the train I had one of those curious musical visions which only very rarely visit me. I hear strange and very beautiful chords, generally full, slow and grand, succeeding each other in most interesting sequences. I do not invent them, I could not; they pass before my mind, and I only listen. Now and then my will seems aroused when I see ahead how some fine resolution might follow, and I seem to _will_ that certain chords should come, and then they do come; but then my will seems suspended again, and they go on quite independently. It is so interesting, the chords seem to _fold over each other_, and die away down into music of infinite softness, and then they _un_fold and open out, as if great curtains were being withdrawn one after another, widening the view, till, with a gathering power and intensity and fulness, it seems as if the very skies were being opened out before one, and a sort of great blaze and glory of music, such as my outward ears never heard, gradually swells out in perfectly sublime splendour. This time there was an added feature; I seemed to hear depths and heights of sound beyond the scale which human ears can receive, keen, far-up octaves, like vividly twinkling _starlight_ of music, and mighty slow vibrations of gigantic strings going down into grand thunders of depths, octaves below anything otherwise appreciable as musical notes. Then, all at once, it seemed as if my soul had got a new sense, and I could _see_ this inner music as well as hear it; and then it was like gazing down into marvellous _abysses of sound_, and up into dazzling regions of what, to the eye, would have been light and colour, but to this new sense was _sound_.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ONE WORD MORE. TO E. B. B. _London, September, 1855._ I. There they are, my fifty men and women Naming me the fifty poems finished! Take them, love, the book and me together: Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. II. Rafael made a century of sonnets, Made and wrote them in a certain volume Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil Else he only used to draw Madonnas: These, the world might view—but one, the volume. Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you. Did she live and love it all her life-time? Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets, Die and let it drop beside her pillow Where it lay in place of Rafael’s glory, Rafael’s cheek so duteous and so loving— Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter’s, Rafael’s cheek, her love had turned a poet’s? III.