Therefore, I knew not, nor need I ever know, if beneath that Magic Duet others partook my celestial spirit-swoon, or were borne over mountain, over billow, through air and cloud and ether, to that verge where life is ultimated, and Illusion delivers up the soul it has been forming to Pure Being.

From what did the Magic Duet proceed? Signor Matthias shoved the open piano out before us, and a flame was made to gleam along the keys; but it was to my mood a sorry trick; the piano had nothing to do with the music but to distract attention from its real source. It was the duet of a 'cello and a flute, I think; at least, I know that there was a flute, a Zauberflötte; and neither viola nor violin can be made to wed a flute alone; they are rival heroes in spheres united but separate; set together, they are Douglas and Percy.

The Duet I have always loved; alas, that it should be so rare in music! I have always felt that in music, also, "two is company, three is a crowd." Two-part songs are plenty; melodies "arranged for two voices" you shall hear from Laura and Matilda in any house which has blonde and brunette daughters; but the true Duet, as of the blue sky and the green earth mingling in the violet-the fragrances of lavender and vanilla offering up to the Sun-deity their incense on the heliotrope-altar-Jesus and the Virgin on canvas-by Heaven, such Duets are true, but not common !

Such an one I now heard; it was in three movements; and at each movement some pearly gate of my life swung open.

I. ANTIPHONE (Con Fuoco).

The high crag can not work me harm,
Nor leaping torrents when they howl;
The babe I carry on my arm,

He saves for me my precious soul.

The first theme was the Duet of the mother and her babe; straight uprose the vision of the one bending over the other, as God's beaming sky over the world it embosoms; a bending which is a vaulting; a clear strain, with choral laughter, and movement came from the babe.

"How is it that, being weakest of all, I am strongest of all? I have not yet ceased to feel the encircling arm of God; it is thine, O my mother! Thus safe, on a breast which feels its love to be

infinite as God, I leave to those whom life's garish noon has blinded, fear and paltering and compliance; an inch of life I have, yet that inch a king. Others reason of God, dream, doubt, hope, fear, deny concerning him; to my lips he hath set the fountain of his grace; I look up into his blue maternal eye. Silent, I never fail to convince; powerless, I lead lion and lamb together on to the Golden Age. And all by the inflow of thy divine life, O my mother! Thy Beauty, thy Love, thy Power, these are my Holy and Blessed Trinity."

Then the tide of the 'cello, ebbing upward, mingled with the flute, and the theme was of the Greek mother.

Frightful! There, on the verge of a precipice, concealed till then, the mother sees her child, reaching forth nearer and nearer to the abyss, seeking a flower. A word might cause the start which would determine the balance toward the fatal grasp for the floral syren! What shall the mother do? What the heart whispers she bares her breast,- the flower loses its beauty in the contrast. The babe knows its home, and springs back to nestle there.

"Hail, mother; through life, from precipice after precipicefrom fatal pitfalls and snares and perils, where there is no other, help thy Love is the saving breast to recall the tempted; thou standest with preventing grace in the midst of every path that leads downward !”

Then sang the mother: "Yet can I never say whether thou or I be the parent. Am I not new-born in thee? Am I not at thy breast, also? O sweet draughts of innocence, and faith and love! Lo, from thine eyes, thy soft touch, I am brought forth I am nourished! I give nought that I do not receive."

Then I knew that, as though I grow older, I never cease to live entirely on milk; that the process of its formation is only transferred from her frame to my own, and yet all that nourishes must first turn to chyle; even so my higher life must be fed on the child-like spirit; I need not, I must not grow old; my gray hairs will be a white blossoming, not a fading; my earthlife will be the womb of an ever-dawning spirit. Child of earth, thy mother hath bound thy baby-brow with white lilies; so long as thou rememberest her, they will never fade; and thou shalt be of those who forever dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the Kingdom of Infancy.

II. ALLEGRO (Con Dolcessa).

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red.

All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth;

And is the mill-round of our fate,

A Sun-path in thy worth.

In the second theme I saw no precipices, and, of course, no peaks-they imply each the other; therefore, if the prospects were not from dizziest height, neither were the perils imminent. I saw many young men and maidens, by twos-generally man with man, maid with maid-pass cheerfully into a desert. Then standing at the desert's farthest verge, I saw two youths emerge from the waste. And the rest? Ah, this is the Duet of Friendship; and Love's dangers do not more test the soul than this desert, which, with friends, must be gladdened each moment by inexhaustable resources, or it grows tedious, and they part. Therefore, of fourscore who started, only two found the range of the oases, the fountains, and were saved to each other.

What can my friend be to me? Let him serve me, and I lose the fulness of the one tie in manifold other ties jealous Friendship says, "I am not then entirely needed; I may break and yet leave you bound by obligations." Obligation! Ah, hateful word! a poisoned fang to all love between man and man, man and woman: all the worse when the fellow-word gratitude gives that serpent the glittering scales and the line of beauty.

Let my friend be my thinker, and even more am I a mendicant. O friend, I must from thee, more than from all foes, defend myself! This the Duet taught me, that its strain could alone be repeated in Friendship when there was entire agreement: to be friends, we must see the same Truth, lie in the same bleaching Light. I know my identity with all mankind; that really, as I am breathing the same elements with them, I am living from the same elemental truths; with them, however, in lymbic relations, we are divided by word-barriers; seeing eye to eye is throbbing heart to heart. Therefore Friendship is purely intellectual; we are two who can not be tricked with words any more.

As there are two eyes given man, that he may the better see every object, so is Friendship the resting of two minds on each and all; and there can be no difference of opinion.

Equally does Friendship spurn sameness or compliance; that takes the hydrogen from the water at my lips, and leaves me a single and deadly element.

Friendship is what the telescope and the microscope have: if one say, "I have visited the farthest star and found this truth," the other responds, "And I have communed with the remotest atom and heard it echo the same." A geologist came to tell the story of the strata to his friend the poet; but, ere he spake, the poet read the whole from the cosmic ring onward to Plato in his friend's brow, where all was summed up. Newton met Gardiner, and with them the seven notes of the gamut met the seven colors, and they heard chord on chord of spheral music. This, then, is Friendship: two that trust each other away from personalities, and never fail to bring at each contact mutual verification. This is what the ancient rite of Confirmation whispers: Find thy truth, and await the priestly hand of thy friend to bring thereto the Eternal Seal.

III. ANDANTE (Con Mosso).
Within this bosom she was born-
I say not if 'twas day or night,
I say not if 'twas eve or morn,
When Lilie saw the light.

A vision that for seventeen years
Had floated in men's eyes was she;

A bright machine of smiles and tears,

No more till she knew me.

Into my arms that vision crept,

And nothing knew she there should find;
And I breathed on her as she slept,

And she became a Mind.

This was the prelude of a sculptor who had carved his goddess, and clasped her with a thrill of prayer to his breast then the life-producing Promethean spark, so long hidden, was generated; the statue moved and lived a Soul.

And now began the Duet of Love.

Where lately the desert-plain had stretched, yawned now the mouth of a Mammoth Cavern. The Guide lighted their torches at an altar, and led the way.

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We need but go a short way to learn all," they said. The Guide smiled, and silently led the way.

And now through pictured halls, tapestried chambers, gothic avenues, foliated arches, fretted ceilings, they passed; by the mouth of the Pit, over Stygian waves, over Elysian fields, they passed; the holy stars rose above them; it was an unending enchantment. And at this I most marveled and gloried, that no embroidered chamber, nor star-sown vault, nor flower-strewn grotto which they ever entered could retain them a deeper mystery, a more delicious glory gleamed beyond. And they stood at last with feet pressing the verge of yet another cavern, and they confessed that Love's torch lighted on to inexhaustable Life, and that at the end of the world it was yet fresh, and with Eternity before it.

Then a few sharp, quick notes said, All other pleasures are not worth Love's pains.

The theme which followed wrung tears from my heart. One turned upon his bride, and with flushed cheek (yet the eye and mouth were calm) cried, "Put out thy love to school!" and, again, “I will not descend to meet even thee."

They were not light words, nor lightly said. She started back, the blood ran swift to her face, and mounted, where blood is always dangerous, above the brow.

"Take back those words," she said.

"Hast thou forgotten thy hollow thought which caused them, as fire causes wind?"

"Take back thy words!"

"Never! Look you, were thou not only my wife of many years, but the last human face left on earth, which losing I should lose all fellowship with my kind, and thy price were to take back those words which were not spoken in anger, I should not recall them."

- and, saying, meant.

"Then we part," she said"Not the smallest droplet of that auburn tairn above thy brow shall be held in the hollow of my hand, not the outmost hem of thy vesture shall be clutched; for I know that if thou leave me it will be to put thy love to school, till I need no more descend to meet thee, or tarry from my heaven-scaling birth-right for thee." "Then I go, for I love thee not.”

"It is well. Yet, ere thou go, ere we part, hear Love's Legend:

"In the Court of Arthur, flower of Kings, lived poor misshapen