midnight
There was no sign of a returning sail , and he resumed his study of the sumptuous sky , the colors of which were now deepening and burning with increasing lustre , while an array of clouds of the deepest purple hue , swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as though to form his footstool . `` One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded , and that all this aerial pomp , -- this strange silence , -- was just the pause , the supreme moment before the angels descended , '' he mused , with a half-smile at his own fancy , for though something of a poet at heart , he was much more of a cynic . He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps , but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature , which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate . And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight , -- something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens , as compared with the 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 .