When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which
peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side
aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking
a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young
apprehension--(whether it be _that_, in which the psalmist, weary of
the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings--or _that
other_, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth
by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)--a holy calm
pervadeth me.--I am for the time

--rapt above earth,
And possess joys not promised at my birth.

But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul
prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in
her capacity to receive,--impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his
"heavenly,"--still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and
fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted _German_ ocean,
above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those
Arions _Haydn_ and _Mozart_, with their attendant tritons, _Bach_,
_Beethoven_, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up
would but plunge me again in the deeps,--I stagger under the weight
of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end;--clouds, as of
frankincense, oppress me--priests, altars, censers, dazzle before
me--the genius of _his_ religion hath me in her toils--a shadowy
triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so
ingenuous he is Pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of
dreams, a she-Pope too,--tri-coroneted like himself!--I am converted,
and yet a Protestant;--at once _malleus hereticorum_, and myself grand