"Your gallery
Ha we pass'd through, not without much content
In many singularities; but we saw not
That which my daughter came to look upon,
The state of her mother."
Winter's Tale.

It seemed to me strange, that all this time I had heard no music in the
fairy palace. I was convinced there must be music in it, but that my
sense was as yet too gross to receive the influence of those mysterious
motions that beget sound. Sometimes I felt sure, from the way the few
figures of which I got such transitory glimpses passed me, or glided
into vacancy before me, that they were moving to the law of music;
and, in fact, several times I fancied for a moment that I heard a few
wondrous tones coming I knew not whence. But they did not last long
enough to convince me that I had heard them with the bodily sense. Such
as they were, however, they took strange liberties with me, causing me
to burst suddenly into tears, of which there was no presence to make
me ashamed, or casting me into a kind of trance of speechless delight,
which, passing as suddenly, left me faint and longing for more.

Now, on an evening, before I had been a week in the palace, I was
wandering through one lighted arcade and corridor after another. At
length I arrived, through a door that closed behind me, in another vast
hall of the palace. It was filled with a subdued crimson light; by
which I saw that slender pillars of black, built close to walls of white
marble, rose to a great height, and then, dividing into innumerable
divergent arches, supported a roof, like the walls, of white marble,
upon which the arches intersected intricately, forming a fretting of
black upon the white, like the network of a skeleton-leaf. The floor was
black.