method of communication heard and understood?  The general believed it was.  In the Magnificat the organ seemed to give an answer which came to him in the vibrations of the air.  The soul of the nun floated towards him on the wings of the notes she touched, quivering with the movements of the sound.  The music burst forth with power; it glorified the church.  This hymn of joy, consecrated by the sublime liturgy of Roman Christianity to the uplifting of the soul in presence of the splendors of the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart terrified at its own happiness in presence of the splendors of a perishable love, which still lived, and came to move it once more beyond the tomb where this woman had buried herself, to rise again the bride of Christ.

The organ is beyond all question the finest, the most daring, the most magnificent of the instruments created by human genius.  It is an orchestra in itself, from which a practiced hand may demand all things; for it expresses all things.  Is it not, as it were, a coign of vantage, where the soul may poise itself ere it springs into space, bearing, as it flies, the listening mind through a thousand scenes of life towards the infinite which parts earth from heaven?  The longer a poet listens to its gigantic harmonies, the more fully will he comprehend that between kneeling humanity and the God hidden by the dazzling rays of the Holy of Holies, the hundred voices of terrestrial choirs can alone bridge the vast distance and interpret to Heaven the prayers of men in all the omnipotence of their desires, in the diversities of their woe, with the tints of their meditations and their ecstasies, with the impetuous spring of their repentance, and the thousand imaginations of their manifold beliefs.  Yes! beneath these soaring vaults the harmonies born of the genius of sacred things find a yet unheard-of grandeur, which adorns and strengthens them.  Here the dim light, the deep silence, the voices alternating with the solemn tones of the organ, seem like a veil through which the luminous attributes of God himself pierce and radiate.  Yet all these sacred riches now seem flung like a grain of incense on the frail altar of an earthly love, in presence of the eternal throne of a jealous and avenging Deity.  The joy of the nun had not the gravity which properly belongs to the solemnity of the Magnificat.  She gave to the music rich and graceful modulations, whose rhythms breathed of human gayety; her measures ran into the brilliant cadences of a great singer striving to express her love, and the notes rose buoyantly like the carol of a bird by the side of its mate.  At moments she darted back into the past, as if to sport there or to weep there for an instant.  Her changing moods had something discomposed about them, like the agitations of a happy woman rejoicing at the return of her lover.  Then, as these supple strains of passionate emotion ceased, the soul that spoke returned upon itself; the musician passed from the major to