referential and seemingly worshipping silence of the earth,--that,
for a few moments, awed him into a sense of the spiritual and
unseen. 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. The sweet liquid notes were those of an old
Norwegian mountain melody, one of those wildly pathetic FOLK-SONGS
that seem to hold all the sorrow, wonder, wistfulness, and
indescribable yearning of a heart too full for other speech than
music. He started to his feet and looked around him for the singer.
There was no one visible. The amber streaks in the sky were leaping
into crimson flame; the Fjord glowed like the burning lake of
Dante's vision; one solitary sea-gull winged its graceful, noiseless
flight far above, its white pinions shimmering like jewels as it
crossed the radiance of the heavens. Other sign of animal life there