Suddenly the notes of the deep-laboring organ burst upon the ear, falling with doubled and redoubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of sound.  How well do their volume and grandeur accord with this mighty building!  With what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe their awful harmony through these caves of death, and make the silent sepulcher vocal!  And now they rise in triumph and acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes, and piling sound on sound.  And now they pause, and the soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of melody; they soar aloft, and warble along the roof, and seem to play about these lofty vaults like the pure airs of heaven.  Again the pealing organ heaves its thrilling thunders, compressing air into music, and rolling it forth upon the soul.  What long-drawn cadences!  What solemn, sweeping concords!  It grows more and more dense and powerful—­it fills the vast pile, and seems to jar the very walls—­the ear is stunned—­the senses are overwhelmed.  And now it is winding up in full jubilee—­it is rising from the earth to heaven—­the very soul seems rapt away and floated upward on this swelling tide of harmony!...

I rose and prepared to leave the abbey.  As I descended the flight of steps which lead into the body of the building, my eye was caught by the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and I ascended the small staircase that conducts to it, to take from thence a general survey of this wilderness of tombs.  The shrine is elevated upon a kind of platform, and close around it are the sepulchers of various kings and queens.  From this eminence the eye looks down between pillars and funeral trophies to the chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs; where warriors, prelates, courtiers and statesmen lie moldering in their “beds of darkness.”  Close by me stood the great chair of coronation, rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous taste of a remote and Gothic age.  The scene seemed almost as if contrived, with theatrical artifice, to produce an effect upon the beholder.  Here was a type of the beginning and the end of human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step from the throne to the sepulcher.  Would not one think that these incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to living greatness, to show it, even in the moment of its proudest exaltation, the neglect and dishonor to which it must soon arrive; how soon that crown which encircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie down in the dust and disgraces of the tomb, and be trampled upon by the feet of the meanest of the multitude?...

The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were already wrapt in the obscurity of twilight.  The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker.  The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the Poet’s Corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound.  I slowly retraced my morning’s walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the cloisters the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes.