We were still enwrapped in this august silence when I became conscious that somewhere, afar off, beyond the tapestry curtain, there were stealing toward us strains of unusual, ineffable music, tantalizingly sweet and vague.
Gradually the almost indistinguishable sounds detached themselves from, and rose above, the pulsing silence,—or that unappreciable harmony we call silence,—and swelled up among the arches that ribbed the lofty ceiling, and rolled and reverberated through the great dome above, and came reflected down to us in refined and sublimated undulations.
Our souls—my soul,—in this new wonder and ecstasy I forgot Severnius,—awoke in responsive raptures, inconceivably thrilling and exalted.
I did not need to be told that it was sacred music, it invoked the Divine Presence unmistakably. No influence that had ever before been trained upon my spiritual senses had so compelled to adoration of the Supreme One who holds and rules all worlds.
“He lifts me to the golden doors;
The flashes come and go;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,
And strows her lights below,
And deepens on and up! the gates