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I was listening to the varied fugue introitus that the organist was playing from the gallery beyond the pulpit, playing with the full wind power of the venerable reed instrument he skilfully manipulated, having all the stops out, diapasons, trumpet, vox humana, and the rest.
There is a certain music, we do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a man everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, never the swelling diapasons of the organ, and never the deep ecstasies of the four magic strings.
"He was not pleased with the idea, having in mind the expressionless organ of a dozen years ago when only a small portion of most organs was enclosed in a swell-box. Doubtless thinking also of a style of organ performance which plays Schumann's Träumerei on the great organ diapasons, he said it made him think of a hippopotamus wearing a clover leaf in his mouth."
My feeling for religious music was then, as since, very deep; and the organ of Trinity gave satisfaction to this feeling; the tremulous ground-tone of the great pedal diapasons thrilling me through and through. At this period, about 1843, began my visits with the family to Saratoga.
Throbbing bass viols of roaring vernal winds, diapasons of waterfall and torrents these had been flames of emerald; flaming trumpetings of desire that had been great streamers of scarlet rose flames that had dissolved into echoes of fulfillment; diamond burgeonings that melted into silver symphonies like mist entangled Pleiades transmuted into melodies; chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced.
Our habitation for the night was a dark, muddy, odorous storehouse, in whose nether apartment we munched a frugal supper, then climbed a ladder to beds upon the bare floor between stacks of snake-root, which had accumulated from barterings with the Indians. During the night the rainstorm grew to a gale which rocked our night's home like a ship at sea to the music of heaven's grand diapasons.
It was partly because the foreigner avoided disputing with the Germans, who made discussion unpleasant by their acrid, dictatorial manners and drowning diapasons, that their arrogance had so rapidly grown out of bounds. They do not recognize courtesies in debate, fly off the handle, burst in with interruptions on the half-finished statements and sentences of others.
For the long strain was on the country; underneath all its outward seeming of things going on as usual there shook a deep vibration, like the air trembling to vast organ pipes in diapasons too profound to reach the ear as sound: one felt, not heard, thunder in the ground under one's feet.
That our mountains are dumb and inarticulate, that our forests chant the litany of the pines untranslated to the winds of heaven, and that our cataracts thunder their diapasons inimitable to art is no proof that though we are dumb and inarticulate, we are not lifted and transported and inspired by the wondrous beauties of the heritage God has given us.
Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.
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