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Not for a meaner use ascend Her columns or her arches bend; Nor of a theme less solemn tells The mighty surge that ebbs and swells, And still between each awful pause, >From the high vault an answer draws, In varied tone, prolonged and high, That mocks the organ's melody; Nor doth its entrance front in vain To old Iona's holy fane, That Nature's voice might seem to say, Well hast thou done, frail child of clay, Thy humble powers that stately shrine Tasked high and hard but witness mine."
And when the awful rite was finished, and with cold hand in cold hand, the Married of Eternity withdrew, the organ's peal of solemn triumph drowned the Wedding Knell. Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper.
I am often carried very high on the waves of splendid church music, when the organ's thunder rolls 'through vaulted aisles' and the angelic voices of a trained choir chant the aspirations of my soul for me; and when an Edinburgh congregation stands, and the precentor leads in that noble paraphrase, 'God of our fathers, be the God Of their succeeding race,
And all the mighty chanting of the organ's multitudinous voices that afternoon seemed to Bibbs to be chorusing of her and interpreting her, singing her thoughts and singing for him the world of humble gratitude that was in his heart because she was so kind to him. It all meant Mary. But when she asked him what it meant, on their homeward way, he was silent.
The long procession ended at last in a straggling group of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town, in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys' singing.
It is not to be expected that any country village of two streets, much less Greenfield, could long remain ignorant of such a new and amazing phase as the devotion of any man to any woman therein; but, as nobody liked to interfere too soon in what might only be, after all, a mere business arrangement, Greenfield contented itself with using its eyes, its ears, and its tongues, with one exception to the latter organ's clatter, in favor of Hitty Hyde; to her no one dared as yet approach with gossip or advice.
Fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ's keys! Blow, bugler, blow, until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wandering mid the vine-clad hills! but know your sweetest strains are but discord compared with childhood's happy laugh the laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy!
Once more we gaze delighted upon lovely valleys, dark shadowy gorges, far-reaching plains of cacti and yucca palms, bordered by lofty, snow-tipped mountains; we see again the exuberant fruitfulness of the tropics, and the loveliness of the floral kingdom in this land of the sun; once more we stroll through the dimly lighted aisles of grand cathedrals, listening to the solemn chant of human voices, and the organ's deep reverberating tones; or view again the suggestive ruins of a vanished race.
If, then, the organ's peal and the psalm-tunes reached over to her, where she stood in the kitchen, even this became a quiet and consecrated spot.
Fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ's keys; blow, bugler, blow until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wandering 'mid the vine-clad hills. But know your sweetest strains are discords all compared with childhood's happy laugh the laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy!
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