From the six lateral chapels twelve other childish
voices rose shrilly in grief, mingling with the choir voices
lamentably. From all parts of the church this mourning issued; cries
of anguish responded to the cries of fear. That terrible music was the
voice of sorrows hidden from the world, of secret friendships weeping
for the dead. Never, in any human religion, have the terrors of the
soul, violently torn from the body and stormily shaken in presence of
the fulminating majesty of God, been rendered with such force. Before
that clamor of clamors all artists and their most passionate
compositions must bow humiliated. No, nothing can stand beside that
hymn, which sums all human passions, gives them a galvanic life beyond
the coffin, and leaves them, palpitating still, before the living and
avenging God. These cries of childhood, mingling with the tones of
older voices, including thus in the Song of Death all human life and
its developments, recalling the sufferings of the cradle, swelling to
the griefs of other ages in the stronger male voices and the quavering
of the priests,--all this strident harmony, big with lightning and
thunderbolts, does it not speak with equal force to the daring
imagination, the coldest heart, nay, to philosophers themselves? As we
hear it, we think God speaks; the vaulted arches of no church are mere
material; they have a voice, they tremble, they scatter fear by the
might of their echoes. We think we see unnumbered dead arising and
holding out their hands.
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