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When eternity affirms the conception of an hour."

This thought of some soul of permanence behind the apparent transience of musical sound has again and again found utterance. It provided a motive for Miss Procter's lyric, "The Lost Chord;" it is hinted at in that passage in the "Idylls of the King" where the Seer, speaking to young Gareth and his companions of the magical city of Camelot, says :

"For truly as thou sayest, a Fairy King And Fairy Queens have built the city, son; They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand, And built it to the music of their harps.

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For an ye heard a music, like enow

*

Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so! It cannot be."

Nothing surely could well be plainer than that Mr. Browning, Miss Procter, Lord Tennyson, and Cardinal Newman have, to say the least, felt the imaginative attractiveness of the thought that there is in music a permanent element,-a something which does not pass when the sounds cease to vibrate upon the tympanum, but which endures forever.

We think it can hardly be considered a merely fanciful speculation to regard these voice-figures, which reveal musical sounds in an apprehensible embodiment of form, as an indication of the reality and nature of this permanence. If, in certain artificially provided conditions, music manifests itself as form, is not this a hint that form, which involves a certain substantiality, must be of its very essence ? The word substantiality" has, indeed, too much materialism of suggestion to be perfectly satisfactory; but no better word is available. Form, as an attribute of sub

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They are building still, seeing the city is built stance, is apprehended most surely by the
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever."

The thought is expressed once more with lofty eloquence in Cardinal Newman's great Oxford sermon on "The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine." The preacher said :-"Take another example of an outward and earthly form or economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified-I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning? Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIV., No 1.

sense of touch, and the wave-theories of sound and light demonstrate what had long been tentatively believed without demonstration, that of this sense our senses of hearing and seeing are but finer and subtler manifestations. From this fact comes the obvious inference that, just as the finer' tact of hearing is in essence one with the grosser sensibility to which we give the name of touch, so the objects apprehended by the former have probably, like those apprehended by the latter, a real substance, and therefore a real form. Indeed, we have all had sensible experiences of this essential identity of hearing and feeling which must have suggested to many the hypothesis of a similar identity of the causes producing the diverse but allied sensations. When an artillery review is going on, we cannot only hear the cannonade, but feel the quiver of the glass in the window; if we approach a church in which the organ is being played, we are often conscious of the trembling of the ground some few instants before the wave of pure sound breaks upon the sense of

hearing. Beethoven, after becoming perfectly deaf, retained some strange physical susceptibility which apprised him of the fact that music was being performed, and we have heard of an old gentleman whose deafness was as absolute as that of the great composer, but who was able-if the word may be allowed to "hear" perfectly the music of a pianoforte against the wooden framework of which he pressed the palm of his hand. If, then, music be apprehended by a subtle sense of touch-that sense by means of which we know the forms and boundaries of things-there is nothing inherently irrational in the thought that musical combinations may have forms and boundaries of their own which, though now inapprehensible by us, would at once be made apprehensible by perhaps a very slight extension of the gamut of normal sensation. The sea-waves leave upon the beach a sharply outlined tide-mark; must not the waves of harmony and melody leave as clear and sharp an outline on the shore of ether over which they roll? To speak of the" shape" of a symphony or an oratorio sounds fantastic; but may not such speech be merely a crude and necessarily

inadequate utterance of a dimly discerned truth?

And if this be so, may it not also be that the strains which present themselves to our hearing as sound may to more finely endowed natures-natures embodying our vague conception of angelic existencepresent itself as vision of substantial realities? If the notes produced by Mrs. Watts Hughes suffice to group her floating pigments into shapes of "weird caverns at the bottom of the sea, full of beautifully colored fancy sea-anemones and musselshells, headless snakes, and fairy-cups, and mossy entanglements of bud and leaf-like formi,' the imagination does not find it impossible to accept the belief that the congregated harmonies of Handel and Beethoven and Wagner live as forms of splendor-as lofty mountain summits, as towered and templed cities, as great expanses of luxuriant forest-in the vision of clearer eyes than ours; and that when the last chord of Abt Vogler's improvisation seemed to die upon the air, he had really put the top stone upon a palace as beautiful and enduring as that reared by the magic of Solomon.-Spectator.

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RICHARD PELSE was the chemist. suburb was near the " Angel;" at the top of the City Road; on the confines of Islington. There he led his prosaic lifegetting old, and a bachelor. But into the prosaic years-years before Islingtonthere had burst once the moment of Romance. Then his shop was near Oxford Street. Into the sitting-room over it there had come, one evening, for an hour, the lady of his dream. Unexpectedly; suddenly. She had drawn her chair, by his own, to the fire. They had sat together so; and he had been happy. She had given him his tea; had opened his piano; had played, a while, Xaver Scharwenka's wild music; had kissed him once; and had gone away.

Perhaps his years before and after had seemed at times two deserts, divided by that living stream which was her momen

tary presence. Or perhaps there was an outstretched darkness on one side of the heavens: then a star: then again outstretched darkness-the life of the shop and the suburb.

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Richard Pelse was one of those poor men who are born cultivated one of the cultivated who are born poor. You had only to look at him now, across the counter and the ranged tooth-powder pots-to see the clear cut head, against its background of dry drug jars and Latin-labelled drawers- "Alumens". "Flor: Sul;" " Pot: Bitar;" Cap Papav''-to know that he was individual. A sympathetic spectator might call him original; an unsympathetic, eccentric. What fires burnt in the brownness of his quick, keen, restless eyes? What had left his facenot yet really old-topped with a mass of silvery-white hair? There were the delicate features, decisive and refined; the nose aquiline, the kindly mouth with ner

vous movement at its corners. And, again,
the hands, thin and white and long; with
fingers and thumbs turning back prodig-
iously flexible, subtle, sensitive. And
the spare figure, still quite straight, dressed
in the black frock-coat of his business
hours. Original or eccentric : a man
whom men and women looked at
liked or feared.

either

At home for years within a stone's throw of the Angel, he had all his life been a Londoner. Energy and diligence he had had from his boyhood, but country color had never come into his cheeks; no robustness of the sea's giving, into his frame. All his pursuits were of the town-and nearly all his recollections. His mother was a widowed little news-agent-a withered woman, once pretty and vivacious who kept, when he was a child and a lad, her news-shop in a by-way, two doors from North Audley Street. His father? never knew him.

Hotel Vénat. Though a tradesman, he had tact as well as education; various interests and real kindliness. He could mix quite easily with "his betters"-found his "betters" much more his equals than his neighbors had been. At the Vénat, an argument with an English chaplain brought him into contact with a family of threeColonel Image, a military politician, very well connected, and busy in the House; and his wife, who was above all things fashionable; and his daughter, who was blonde and nineteen.

Richard Pelse must certainly then, with all his earlier deficiencies and disadvantages, have been picturesque, and almost elegant, as well as interesting. The impulsive Miss Image found him so. In the garden, from his ground-floor bedroom, there had been a vision of a tall white figure, of floating muslin, of pale colored He hair. Nearer, there were seen dancing eyes, large and gray, and a mouth that was Cupid's bow. At table d'hôte there was heard the voice that he liked best, and liked at once. A voice? Hardly. An instrument of music. You listened to it as to a well-used violin.

When he was twelve years old his mother died, and a customer of theirs, a druggist of the quarter, took him as "useful boy." Had he ever changed and risen so far afterward as to be a famous physician, it would have been told of him, in pride, or as astonishing, that he had been an errand boy only. As it was, he had in fact been that, but something besides. He was so intelligent that gradually he had got into all the work of the shop. He was civil, and comely too. From selling things behind the counter, he was put into the dispensary. He educated himself; he passed his examinations; he became an assistant who was entirely necessary; then he became a partner. At thirty-five he was a prosperous man and alone; the shop's earlier master having retired. For Richard Pelse, before that happened, there had been twenty years of progress, and of self-denial; no doubt of satisfactory, but of unremitting work. Then he allowed himself a holiday, and with a valise by his side and a "Baedeker" in his pocket, started for Switzerland and Savoy.

II.

Mr. Pelse had made more than half his tour and had got over his surprises, the sense of all that was strange, when he found himself, one Sunday, arrived at Aix-les-Bains for two days' rest, and for the charm of its beauty. He stayed at the

In the drawing-room he got into talk with her. Was she not, unexpectedly, the ideal realized ?—the lady of the dream of all his youth.

But that night he reflected on the distance between them. He was no ambitious snob, scheming for marriage in a sphere not his. The distance the distance! No, there could never be marriage, or, his career must change first. Should he leave to-morrow, and forget the encounter? Should he enjoy her for two days, and forget her then instead, or hug the memory? At all events, he did not go.

And on both sides, in the short two days-prolonged to three and four-there was interest and fascination. Perhaps he should have told her father who he was. Instead of it, he told her. There was a recoil then-and it might have saved them. Her knowledge of the world and of the convenances -nineteen, but bred in society -was suddenly uppermost. Nothing more could be said to him, and she would mention to her mother as a piece of gossip to be heard and forgotten-as the funny adventure of travelling and of chance acquaintance that the man was a shopkeeper, a chemist; might have sold her

sponges, nail brushes, eau de Cologne. Then the simplicity, the naturalness, warmth, impulsiveness-which were in her too-came uppermost in their turn. She would tell none of that. She would keep him to herself, for the time at least-him and his secret. There was mutual attraction, strong and unquestionable. Elective. affinities. And such things had their rights.

Wilful and independent-it seemed so then she laid herself out to be with him. Mrs. Image was indolent, physically. In the morning the military politician was wont to wait in the ante-chamber of a man of science who was great on the healing waters; later in the day he was borne from the Bath House, closely mutiled, in a curtained chair, and put to bed till dinner-time at the hotel. He was not seriously ill, however, and the treatment, which had begun a fortnight before Richard Pelse's arrival, would now soon be over. Anyhow their opportunities were numbered. There was an end to meetings -chance meetings, after all, though wished for on both sides at noon, under the shade of the grouped trees in a sun-smitten park encircled by the mountains; at night, amid the soft illuminations of the Villa des Fleurs, whither Miss Image was chaperoned; again at breakfast time, when almost from the open windows of the hotel could be discerned, here and there, between luxuriant foliage, gold and greenbeyond the richness of walnut and chestnut branch, beyond the vines, beyond the poplar marshes and the sunny fields- -a level flash of turquoise, which was the Lac de Bourget.

-

"We go to-night," said Beatrice, meeting Mr. Pelse by the Roman Arch, when she had deposited her father for his last consultation.

"Should I speak to Colonel Image?" he urged, almost hopelessly.

...

"I was mad for you to do it; but you never must. Nothing could possibly come of it but harm. You must be loyal and obey me. There is not the very ghost of a chance for us. Oh ! you won't think of me very long. You have your own life, you know; and I must have mine. Silly, silly lovers! I might wait; but then it could never, never be. Dick! -forget me!"

"And in England we live almost in the next street," he said to her. "There is

I have

nothing but class that divides us. done something already, if you recollect how I began. I could do more, and go a good deal further. You are the first lady I ever talked to, intimately. You would change me-you would bring me up to you.

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"There is nothing in me to bring you up to, Dick. Think how young I am! I am a little fool, who happened to take a fancy to you. Pretty, am I? But a little fool, after all. You treated me so gravely and so well. I had been flattered often enough. And I was mad to be respected. There is no chivalry left. Your respect was flattery, too. . . Here is my photograph, because I trust you. But forget me, forget me! My last word. Take my hand. And good-by!"

He took her hands-both of them-and so saw the last of her. And, by another train, he too went back to London, to the chemist's shop.

It was curious, at first, to think, as he was making up prescriptions, or giving them to his assistants, that she was within a stone's throw of that pestle and mortar : almost within sight of the green and red and straw-colored jars that stood in his shop window and were the sign of his calling. His shop was in Orchard Street; their house in Manchester Square. Once, did she pass the shop? Once, when he was on the Oxford Street pavement, was that she, borne along in a Victoria?

But gradually he was training himself to forget all that. He was loyal, obedientwas accepting the inevitable. Was it not a chance fancy? Was it not in sheer impulsiveness-in recognition of he wondered what in him, besides the deepest admiration

that she had flung him her confidence ; honored him by liking? Could that last with her? Could it anyhow have lasted? Probably he would never see her again. Might he not one day console himself?— he once half whispered. No-it could never be that. He was so dainty about women; he was so particular-he either wanted nothing, or exacted so much-the experience of a rapid fascination would never be repeated. never be repeated. He was an idealistof those who want, in women, a picture and a vision : not a housekeeper.

III.

The autumn dragged along. Pelse had acquired from America the rights to an

exclusive sale of a particular preparation of the Hypophosphites, and the Society doctors the men who had charge of Royalty and of over-tasked celebrities, of smart people, and of the very rich-had taken to recommend it. The extra work which that involved made him very busy, and his own more accustomed work, in all its thousand details, was done at his shop with such a singular nicety-of which he of course was the inspirer-that the shop was more and more frequented.

Winter succeeded to autumn. A thick fog had lain for days over Orchard Street. Then there came a little snow. But in the parlor over the shop-with the three windows closely curtained-one could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat fireplace; the little low tea table; a bookcase in which Pelse-before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains-had been putting, gradually, first editions of the English Poets; a cabinet of china, in which— but always before Aix-les-Bains-he had taken to accumulate some pretty English things of whitest paste or finest painting a Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley's pink gray roses, of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch. How the things had lost interest for him! "From the moment," says some French art critic, "that a woman occupies me, my collection does not exist." And many a woman may lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had occupied Richard Pelse.

It was on an evening in December, when Pelse was in the sitting-room, tired with the day's labors, and not particularly happy with the evening newspapers-for, apart from any causes of private discontent, the Pall Mall had told him that our upper classes were unworthy of confidence, and from the St. James's he had gathered that even the lower could scarcely boast complete enlightenment-it was on an evening in December, when the chemist was so circumstanced, that his neat servant, opening the door of the parlor, held it back for the entrance of a veiled tall lady. "Miss Image," said the servant, for the name had been frankly given her.

The servant vanished. Richard Pelse rose from his seat, with his heart beating. The tall lady was standing there with lifted

arms, detaching veil and the broad velvet hat; a minute afterward, laying aside her furs and her warm wraps, the glowing face of a swift walker in the winter weather was made visible: the blonde head, the slim and straight and rounded figure had got up to the fireplace. She put her hand out toward Richard Pelse. He took it, exclaimed to her, by her name: nothing Beatrice !"-wheeled a chair to And down she sat.

more

the fire.

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Yes. I could stand it no longer. I have passed the place so often. I was mad to see you. They are gone into the country on a visit. I could manage it tonight. She looked quite good and sweet and serious-passionate it might be, as well as young, but, at all events, no intriguing Miss. Strange-the intuitive trust she had in him, to come there so ! "Perhaps you can give me some tea?"

He flew downstairs to order it-a bell's summons would have been inadequate to the occasion, and would have given no vent to his delight. Ten minutes after, it was in front of the fire. The lamp was just behind her. Might he be calm now; might he be excited? Might he be paralyzed with astonishment? She was so quiet and so bright, he was made quiet too. She sat there as in an old and daily place

the blonde head, the eyes, the figure's lines. He was so happy. Suddenly his house was made a home.

"How have you been? How are you?" But before he answered, he had given her a stool, respectfully: had put a cushion at her head. "How good of you!" she said, with her gray eyes very beautiful thanking him for his mental attitude: not for his cushion and his stocl.

Has

"Well, you know, I have been trying to forget you. Have you changed your mind?" She gazed into the fire. the time come for me to speak?" he continued. His chair was close beside hers. Why did you come here ?''

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"I suppose I felt you cared about me. And I was sick of not coming. I suppose I felt you were a friend. No, I don't think I have changed my mind at all. But I am one of the girls who can do mad things. And girls who can do mad things, once or twice in their lives at all events, are commoner-much commoner-than proper people think. So here I am! "Tisn't wonderful. Father and mother are at Lord Sevenoak's."

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