Mythical passages from the poets he loved came
into his memory, and stray fragments of old songs and ballads he had
known in his childhood returned to him with haunting persistence. It
was, for him, one of those sudden halts in life which we all
experience,--an instant,--when time and the world seem to stand still,
as though to permit us easy breathing; a brief space,--in which we are
allowed to stop and wonder awhile at the strange unaccountable force
within us, that enables us to stand with such calm, smiling audacity, on
our small pin's point of the present, between the wide dark gaps of past
and future; a small hush,--in which the gigantic engines of the universe
appear to revolve no more, and the immortal Soul of man itself is
subjected and over-ruled by supreme and eternal Thought. Drifting away
on those delicate imperceptible lines that lie between reality and
dreamland, the watcher of the midnight sun gave himself up to the half
painful, half delicious sense of being drawn in, absorbed, and lost in
infinite imaginings, when the intense stillness around him was broken by
the sound of a voice singing, a full, rich contralto, that rang through
the air with the clearness of a golden bell.
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