But his greatest delight was in music.  He knew a smattering of it scientifically, enough to follow up subjects and to a certain extent to recognize chords.  There occurs in one of his letters to me the following passage, which I venture to quote.  He is speaking of the delight of pure sound as apart from melody: 

“I remember once,” he writes, “being with a great organist in a cathedral organ-loft, sitting upon the bench at his side.  He was playing a Mass of Schubert’s, and close to the end, at the last chord but two—­he was dying to a very soft close, sliding in handles all over the banks of stops—­he nodded with his head to the rows of pedal stops with their red labels, as though to indicate where danger lay.  ‘Put your hand on the thirty-two foot,’ he said.  There it was ‘Double open wood 32 ft.’ And just as his fingers slid on to the last chord, ‘Now,’ he said.

“Ah! that was it; the great wooden pipe close to my ear began to blow and quiver; and hark! not sound, but sensation—­the great rapturous stir of the air; a drowsy thunder in the roof of nave and choir; the grim saints stirred and rattled ill their leaded casements, while the melodious roar died away as softly as it had begun, sinking to silence with many a murmurous pulsation, many a throb of sighing sound.”

Organ-playing, organ music, was the one subject on which I have heard him wax enthusiastic.  His talk and his letters always become rhetorical when he deals with music; his musical metaphors are always carefully worked out; he compares a man of settled purpose, in whose life the “motive was very apparent,” to “the great lazy horns, that you can always hear in the orchestra pouring out their notes hollow and sweet, however loud the violins shiver or the trumpets cry.”  He often went up to London to hear music.  The St. James’s Hall Concerts were his especial delight.  I find later a description of the effect produced on him by Wagner.

“I have just come back from the Albert Hall, from hearing the ‘Meistersanger,’ Wagner himself conducting.  I may safely say I think that I never experienced such absolute artistic rapture before as at certain parts of this; for instance, in the overture, at one place where the strings suddenly cease and there comes a peculiar chromatic waft of wind instruments, like a ghostly voice rushing across.  I have never felt anything like it; it swept one right away, and gave one a sense of deep ineffable satisfaction.  I shall always feel for the future that there is an existent region, into which I have now actually penetrated, in which that entire satisfaction is possible, a fact which I have always hitherto doubted.  It is like an initiation.

“But I can not bear the ‘Tannhauser;’ it seems to paint with a fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to speak, of sensuality.  I feel after it as if I had been yielding to a luscious temptation; unnerved, not inspired.”