But who by words can fix the mood that comes and
goes unbidden, like a ghost whose acquaintance is lost with his
vanishing, whom we know not when we do not see? A single happy phrase,
the sound of a wind, the odor of the mere earth may avail to send us
into some lonely, dusky realm of being; but how shall we take our
brother with us, or send him thither when we would? I doubt if even the
poet ever works just what he means on the mind of his fellow. Sisters,
brothers, we cannot meet save in God.
But the nearest mediator of feeling, the most potent, the most delicate,
the most general, the least articulate, the farthest from thought, yet
perhaps the likest to the breath moving upon the soft face of the waters
of chaos, is music. It rose like a soft irrepressible tide in the heart
of Hester; it mingled and became one with her mood; together swelling
they beat at the gates of silence; for life's sake they must rush,
embodied and born in sound, into the outer world where utterance meets
utterance! She looked around her for such an instrument as hitherto had
been always within her reach--rose and walked around the shadowy room
searching.
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