The windows
were driven in, and torrents of rain, carried in the folds of a rushing
wind, poured into the halls. The lights were swept away; and the great
rooms, now dark within, were darkened yet more by the dazzling shoots of
flame from the vault of blackness overhead. Those that ventured to look
out of the windows saw, in the blue brilliancy of the quick-following jets
of lightning, the lake at the foot of the rock, ordinarily so still and so
dark, lighted up, not on the surface only, but down to half its depth; so
that, as it tossed in the wind, like a tortured sea of writhing flames, or
incandescent half-molten serpents of brass, they could not tell whether a
strong phosphorescence did not issue from the transparent body of the
waters, as if earth and sky lightened together, one consenting source of
flaming utterance.
"Sad was the condition of the late plastic mass of living form that had
flowed into shape at the will and law of the music. Broken into
individuals, the common transfusing spirit withdrawn, they stood drenched,
cold, and benumbed, with clinging garments; light, order, harmony, purpose
departed, and chaos restored; the issuings of life turned back on their
sources, chilly and dead.
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