smote the keys with right royal strength, and the piano seemed a thing of life beneath her touch.  The pace became faster, and the thunder rattled and crashed more wildly, and there awoke in the girl’s soul a power of musical utterance that she had never dreamed of in her life before.  Her whole being was swept away in ecstasy; her lips were moving excitedly, and her pulses were leaping like mad.  She seemed no longer to know of the young man beside her, who was bent forward with clenched hands, carried beyond himself by the sight of her exulting power.

And in the meantime, Helen’s music was surging on, building itself up into a great climax that swelled and soared and burst in a deafening thunder crash; and while the air was still throbbing and echoing with it, the girl joined to it her deep voice, grown suddenly conscious of new power: 

  “See, he stamps upon the mountains,
    And he leaps the valleys high! 
  Now he smites his forest harp-strings,
    And he sounds his thunder cry!”

And as the cry came the girl laughed aloud, like a very Valkyrie indeed, her laugh part of the music, and carried on by it; and then gradually as the tempest swept on, the rolling thunder was lost in a march that was the very tread of the Storm-King.  And the march broadened, and the thunder died out of it slowly, and all the wild confusion, and then it rose, glorious and triumphant, and turned to a mighty pean, a mightier one than ever Helen could have made.  The thought of it had come to her as an inspiration, and as a refuge, that the glory of her passion might not be lost.  The march had led her to it, and now it had taken her in its arms and swept her away, as it had swept millions by its majesty.  It was the great Ninth Symphony Hymn: 

  “Hail thee, Joy!  From Heaven descending,
    Daughter from Elysium! 
  Ecstasy our hearts inflaming,
    To thy sacred shrine we come. 
  Thine enchantments bind together
    Those whom custom’s law divides;
  All are brothers, all united,
    Where thy gentle wing abides.”

And Helen sang it as one possessed by it, as one made drunk with its glory—­as the very Goddess of Joy that she was.  For the Storm-King and his legions had fled, and another vision had come into her heart, a vision that every one ought to carry with him when the great symphony is to be heard.  He should see the hall in Vienna where it was given for the last time in the great master’s life, and see the great master himself, the bowed and broken figure that all musicians worship, standing up to conduct it; and see him leading it through all its wild surging passion, almost too frantic to be endured; and then, when the last towering climax has passed and the music has ceased and the multitude at his back has burst forth into its thundering shout, see the one pathetic figure standing there aloft before all eyes and still blindly beating the time.  There must have been tears in the eyes of every man in that place to know the reason for it,—­that he from whose heart all their joy had come, he who was lord and master of it, had never heard in his life and could never hope to hear one sound of that music he had written, but must dwell a prisoner in darkness and solitude forever.