Perhaps it was the music of an evening
meeting; or it might be that the organist and choir had met for practice.
Whatever its purpose, it breathed through his heated fancy like a cool
and fragrant wind. It was vague and sweet and wandering at first,
straying on into a strain more mysterious and melancholy, but very
shadowy and subdued, and evoking the innocent and tender moods of early
youth before worldliness had hardened around his heart. Gradually, as he
listened to it, the fires in his brain were allayed, and all yielded to a
sense of coolness and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance of
utter rest, and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own
condition, or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music
from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was
still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and
strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably
mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his
depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe.
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