Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That you might almost say her body thought";

for a thousand delicate nerves were becoming vital once more,--the holy
mystery of womanhood had wrought within her.

When they rose to sing, the tune must needs be one which they had often
sung together, out of the same book, at the singing-school,--one of
those wild, pleading tunes, dear to the heart of New England,--born, if
we may credit the report, in the rocky hollows of its mountains, and
whose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warbling
wail, and in which different parts of the harmony, set contrary to all
the canons of musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic
effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize.
The four parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then
called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with the fitful
strangeness of Aeolian harp, or of winds in mountain-hollows, or the
vague moanings of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her
voice rose over the waves of the treble, and trembled with a pathetic
richness, felt, to her inmost heart, the deep accord of that other
voice which rose to meet hers, so wildly melancholy, as if the soul in
that manly breast had come to meet her soul in the disembodied, shadowy
verity of eternity. The grand old tune, called by our fathers "China,"
never, with its dirge-like melody, drew two souls more out of
themselves, and entwined them more nearly with each other.

The last verse of the hymn spoke of the resurrection of the saints with
Christ:

"Then let the last dread trumpet sound