“Rodomant was in a lawless frame, a frame he had fixed on himself by his outrage on precedent; his subsequent excitement had enchanted him more wildly, and any number of imps and elves were ready to rush at his silent word from the caverns of his haunted brain.  Again, he felt he must spend his energy, his long idleness reacted on a sudden in prodigious strength of intellect, it stirred like a giant refreshed.  Long time ago he had dreamed—­he had entirely forgotten it was a fact that he had been told—­that, if the whole force of that organ were put out, the result would be tremendous.  He had also dreamed—­that is, been assured—­that there was a law made to the purpose that the whole force of the organ was never to be employed.  The law had never been broken, except once;—­but there his memories waxed dim and indistinct; he was at the mercy of his own volition, which resolved on recalling nothing that could dissuade him from his rash and forbidden longing.  Unknown to himself, perhaps the failure of his design to escape, of which the princess had assured him, drove him to the crisis of a more desperate endeavor.  But, whether it was so or not, he was unconscious of it,—­so far innocent.  He sat down, believing himself alone....  ’Softly, softly,’ mocked his whisper—­to himself,—­and he touched alone the whispering reeds, Adelaida held her breath, and chid the beating of her heart, which seemed louder than the mellow pulse that throbbed in tune above.  The symphony that followed fell like a mighty universal hush, through which the clarionet-stop chanted, unuttered but articulate,—­’Give to us peace.’  Then the hush dissolved into a sea of sighs:  ‘Peace, peace!’ they yearned, and the mild deep diapason muttered, ‘Peace.’  She, the one listener, felt, as it were, her brain fill soft with tears, her eyes rained them, and her heart, whose pulses had dropped as calm as dew, echoed the peaceful longing of the whole heart of humanity.  A longing as peaceful in its expression as the peace it longed for; the creation’s travail seemed spent to the edge of joy.

“Suddenly, as light swept chaos, this peaceful fancy was disrupted,—­her heart ravished from its rest, its calm torn from it.  Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna.  The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise; and vast as was the volume of sound, the hands that invoked it had it so completely under control—­voluntary control as yet—­that it did not swamp her sense; her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the measureless immensity of music at its source.  To reach that centre without a circle,—­that perfection which imperfection shadows not,—­that unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to illustrate,—­was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain it, some fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning, fastens to his soul for life.