Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes—one believes at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in sheer human sympathy!
Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)—one whose heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a fiddle-string—by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They are absolute!
Oh, mystery of mysteries!
Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou couldst play!
Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg thy pardon—five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch, make, not a sixth sound, but a star?
What were they, those five sounds? "Do, re, mi, fa, sol?" What must thy songs without words have been, if thou didst ever make any?