As he listened, rapt and
vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced sinking seemed to come to an
end, and with the feeling of one who had been descending for many hours,
and at length lay motionless at the bottom of a deep, dark chasm, he
heard the music fail and cease.
A pause, and then it rose again, blended with the solemn voices of the
choir, sublimed and dilated now, reaching him as though from weird
night gulfs of the upper air, and charged with an overmastering pathos
as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness and silence, in the
aroused and exalted condition of his being, the strains seemed
unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow, and their
mournful and dark significance was now for him. Working within him the
impression of vast, innumerable fleeing shadows, thick-crowding
memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early
dreams and aims, poured across the midnight of his soul, and under the
streaming melancholy of the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous
treason.
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