The evergreens were bowed heavily with the weight of the snow, and across the wood path birches and various trees bent as if in prayer, obstructing the way. The clear air, which was not very cold--for it was one of those subdued days of winter, when the glare of the sun was obstructed by a cloudy mantle--the intense quiet, the strong contrasts of the dark trunks of trees with the heavy evergreens, and the immaculate purity of whiteness laid on by the greatest and sublimest painter were so marked and so lovely that I seemed to be drinking the nectar of the god of beauty, and was soul-subdued.
Up to the Eyry in the evening, I went with others to hear the singing, when Mary, "the nightingale,"--as we sometimes called her--came. I went often and stayed long. Some were at the Hive, reading; some were, perhaps, engaged in Shakespeare; some in their rooms with their families; some at the Cottage practising the piano, and all "following their attractions," to use our common phrase, in their own little sphere--whether it was reading the papers and journals of the day in the improvised reading-room at the Hive, or commenting on the last articles in the _Harbinger,_ or doing a little work out of hours for amusement or profit, or attending one of the interminable number of meetings for consultation and arrangement held almost nightly.
There the quartette sang the "Kyrie," and "Gloria in Excelsis" from the masses of Mozart and Haydn. An edition had just been published and forwarded from London, and by degrees they became familiar to us as household words. Did it not seem strange, you may ask, that these radical thinkers and "come-outers" from ordinary forms of society, should turn with pleasure to the emanations of a profoundly conservative church? I answer that, having freed their minds from sectarian prejudices, they recognized beauty and genius wherever found, and did not care what church or creed they had served, so that they found the gift of beauty from the infinite Father to man in them. With one glorious soprano voice and boundless talent, how much of joy was added to the circle! How we revelled in the choice creations of the masters of harmony, and how, slowly but surely, the missing link that was wanting in my mind to realize that music could cover the void that separated sound from feeling, came to its place--I am tempted to tell.