The most spiritual impression I received was from the music of church organs in the old world.

I stopped one nightfall at Freyburg, Switzerland, to hear the organ of world-wide celebrity in that place.  I went into the cathedral at nightfall.  All the accessories were favourable.  There was only one light in all the cathedral, and that a faint taper on the altar.  I looked up into the venerable arches and saw the shadows of centuries; and when the organ awoke the cathedral awoke, and all the arches seemed to lift and quiver as the music came under them.  That instrument did not seem to be made out of wood and metal, but out of human hearts, so wonderfully did it pulsate with every emotion; now laughing like a child, now sobbing like a tempest.  At one moment the music would die away until you could hear the cricket chirp outside the wall, and then it would roll up until it seemed as if the surge of the sea and the crash of an avalanche had struck the organ-pipes at the same moment.  At one time that night it seemed as if a squadron of saddened spirits going up from earth had met a squadron of descending angels whose glory beat back the woe.

In Edinburgh I met Dr. John Brown, author of the celebrated “Rab and his Friends.”  That one treatise gave him immortality and fame, and yet he was taken at his own request to the insane asylum and died insane.

“What are you writing now, Dr. Brown?” I said to him in his study in Edinburgh.

“Oh, nothing,” he replied, “I never could write.  I shall never try again.”

I saw on his face and heard in his voice that melancholy that so often unhorsed him.

I went to Paris for the first time in this summer of 1870.  It was during the Franco-German war.  I stood studying the exquisite sculpturing of the gate of the Tuileries.  Lost in admiration of the wonderful art of that gate I knew not that I was exciting suspicion.  Lowering my eyes to the crowds of people I found myself being closely inspected by government officials, who from my complexion judged me to be a German, and that for some belligerent purpose I might be examining the gates of the palace.  My explanations in very poor French did not satisfy them, and they followed me long distances until I reached my hotel, and were not satisfied until from my landlord they found that I was only an inoffensive American.  Inoffensive Americans were quite as welcome in Europe in 1870 as they are now.  I was not curious of the signs I found anywhere about me of aristocratic grandeur, of the deference paid to lineage and ancient family name.  I know in America some people look back on the family line, and they are proud to see that they are descended from the Puritans or the Huguenots, and they rejoice in that as though their ancestors had accomplished a great thing to repudiate a Catholic aristocracy.