As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree,
her head resting against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of
Anthony's violin came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul.
Remember that in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira
Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute,
and the Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.
Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there was
no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her heart with
a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had never possessed,
would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never before realized.
When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft wail of delicious woe,
she bent forward into the dark, dreading that something would be lost
in the very struggle of listening; then, after a, pause, a pure human tone
would break the stillness, and soaring, bird-like, higher and higher,
seem to mount to heaven itself, and, "piercing its starry floors,"
lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very grates of infinite bliss.
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