with its great monotonous beat, there begins to show forth the round of
days, hand in hand, and some of their forms are smiling, others sad. But
ever the links of the chain are broken, and memories are linked together
above weeks and months....

The River ... the Bells ... as long as he can remember--far back in the
abysses of time, at every hour of his life--always their voices, familiar
and resonant, have rung out....

Night--half asleep--a pale light made white the window.... The river
murmurs. Through the silence its voice rises omnipotent; it reigns over
all creatures. Sometimes it caresses their sleep, and seems almost itself
to die away in the roaring of its torrent. Sometimes it grows angry, and
howls like a furious beast about to bite. The clamor ceases. Now there is a
murmuring of infinite tenderness, silvery sounds like clear little bells,
like the laughter of children, or soft singing voices, or dancing music--a
great mother voice that never, never goes to sleep! It rocks the child, as
it has rocked through the ages, from birth to death, the generations that
were before him; it fills all his thoughts, and lives in all his dreams,
wraps him round with the cloak of its fluid harmonies, which still will be
about him when he lies in the little cemetery that sleeps by the water's
edge, washed by the Rhine....

The bells.... It is dawn! They answer each other's call, sad, melancholy,
friendly, gentle. At the sound of their slow voices there rise in him hosts
of dreams--dreams of the past, desires, hopes, regrets for creatures who
are gone, unknown to the child, although he had his being in them, and they
live again in him. Ages of memory ring out in that music. So much mourning,
so many festivals! And from the depths of the room it is as though, when
they are heard, there passed lovely waves of sound through the soft air,