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But when the first chords on the harps preluded the hymn of the delivered Israelites, the Prince and Vendramin rose and stood leaning against the opposite sides of the box, and the Duchess, resting her elbow on the velvet ledge, supported her head on her left hand.
"I see hearses and flowers for you," he began, "and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse.
This quintessential medley was as the sonorous blasts of Berlioz, repugnant and exquisite; it swayed the soul of Baldur as the wind sways the flame. There were odours like wingèd dreams; odours as the plucked sounds of celestial harps; odours mystic and evil, corrupt and opulent; odours recalling the sweet, dense smell of chloroform; odours evil, angelic, and anonymous.
If we lose them, heaven gains them. If we mourn, they rejoice. If we hang our harps on the willows, they tune theirs in the eternal orchestra above, rejoicing that we shall soon be with them.
And now Redesman turned about to the music and drew his bow across his fiddle, and the other bows ran out in concert, and the harps followed the story of them, and he lifted up his voice and sang the words of an old song, and all the singers joined him and blended their voices with his.
The Churchman, listening to the solemn chant of weal music or the deep tones of the organ, thinks of the song of the elders and the golden harps of the New Jerusalem. The heaven of the northern nations of Europe was a gross and sensual reflection of the earthly life of a barbarous and brutal people.
Go ask the angel throng, as they tune their harps to melodious songs on high, and they will point to two sister spirits, who day and night in company present themselves before God; and as one rank after another comes up from heathen lands to swell the chorus of the redeemed and ascribe their conversion to the efforts of the early missionary laborers who, under God, were made the humble instruments in the great work, meekly will be heard from the spirit lips of Harriet Newell and Ann H. Judson the reply, "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto the Lamb who was slain, but who liveth forever."
The music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps, tuned to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the strings of the cello. Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my limbs moved in spite of me. In a moment I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes.
There on the snow I believe that I should have bided to sleep the sleep of the frozen, for I hardly dared to move. The snow whirled round me again, but I did not heed it, and with a great roar the wind rose and swept up the rift with a sound as of mighty harps, but it did not rouse me.
And the prodigious feasts, the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts.
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