My earnest manner satisfied him of my truth, and he accordingly went into the room where Bob was still sitting, and comforted him very much in the same manner that my doctor used with me when I was terrified in my first experiment. He told him, laughingly, to be in no apprehension whatever for results, as he would certainly recover from his present feelings intact.
In an instant Bob became perfectly calm, and the former state of happiness succeeded his agonies. We passed out of the doctor’s office and began returning home. On the way he supposed himself a Mandarin freshly come from some triumph over invading tribes. Like myself, in the vision of my victorious march, he heard anthems of laud and glory pealing in his ears; but he did still more—he played one of the instruments himself. Always a man of fine musical imagination, and quite a brilliant pianist, he now possessed a power of melodious creation unknown in his highest natural states. Setting his lips so as to send forth sounds in imitation of a bugle, he played in my hearing a strain of his own impromptu composition so beautiful that it would have done credit to any player upon wind instruments that ever obtained celebrity. For a quarter of a mile I enjoyed this unexpected rapture of music, in the utmost astonishment at a phenomenon I had never conceived of before.
We reached home. The experimenter lay down, and through all the night he was wrapped in visions of the utmost ecstasy. I sat beside his bed for hours, and always became aware of the moment of his highest exaltation by some strain after the manner of that which had cheered our way up the dark and lonely hill, bursting from his lips, even in sleep, with delicious melody. In the morning he awoke at the usual time; but, his temperament being perhaps more sensitive than mine, the hashish delight, without its hallucination, continued for several days. Bob never took it again.
The next case which I shall mention is that of my friend Fred W⸺, who, although now having abandoned hashish forever, still, from the first experiment he made with it, was so delighted with the spell that for several months he made trial of its powers, as successfully, if never to the same extent, as myself. His temperament was the sanguine and nervous commingled; his taste for the arts amounted to a passion. The initiatory test of hashish which he made gave him only its space and time expanding effects, but he had obtained a sufficient glimpse of its weirdness to make him try again.
Upon many a bright moonlight night have I walked with him through streets made balmy by the breath of the summer night, or rowed our boat along the silvery river while he lay in ecstatic musing upon the stern seat. In the dreams of such a man as he or the last one whom I mentioned, by sympathy I lived almost as delicious a hashish life as in my own. Once do I remember well, while we were floating noiselessly between those twin welkins, the glorious sky above us, and its image mirrored in the stream below, his beholding in the clouds that lifted their beamy masses on the western horizon a resplendent city, built amphitheatrically like Algiers, yet in every dome and architrave beautiful with the taintless lustre of marble. And now he cried, “Sing! my mood is congenial to the ethereal spirit of music.” I softly hummed “Spargi d’amaro pianto.” “That is ecstasy!” he broke forth once more. “Do you remember those words, ‘Architecture is frozen music?’ With your ascending notes I saw grand battlements rise immensely into the sky; with the descending tones they sank again, and through all your song I have sat enamored of one delicious dance of Parian marble.”
But his most wonderful experience—wonderful for its exceeding beauty, but still more so for the glimpse which it gave him of the mind’s power of sympathetic perception, was a vision which he had after that which I have just related. Having taken hashish and felt its influence already for several hours, he still retained enough of conscious self-control to visit the room of a certain excellent pianist without exciting the suspicion of the latter. Fred threw himself upon a sofa immediately on entering, and asked the artist to play him some piece of music, without naming any one in particular.
The prelude began. With its first harmonious rise and fall the dreamer was lifted into the choir of a grand cathedral. Thenceforward it was heard no longer as exterior, but I shall proceed to tell how it was internally embodied in one of the most wonderful imaginative representations that it has ever been my lot to know.
The windows of nave and transept were emblazoned, in the most gorgeous coloring, with incidents culled from saintly lives. Far off in the chancel, monks were loading the air with essences that streamed from their golden censers; on the pavement, of inimitable mosaic, kneeled a host of reverent worshippers in silent prayer.
Suddenly, behind him, the great organ began a plaintive minor like the murmur of some bard relieving his heart in threnody. This minor was joined by a gentle treble voice among the choir in which he stood. The low wail rose and fell as with the expression of wholly
