sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not
that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The
hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds,--those and the
storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the
tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes
in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,
fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir,--high in arches,
when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the
vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into
unity,--sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly upon those
clouds which, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementoes of
prostrate sorrow; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music,
felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously
above the causes of grief.

God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk
in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the
meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God
holds with children "communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may
be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world _alone_;
all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God's
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor
mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and
child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude,
therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's heart,
is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has
passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_