six o'clock
the Voice you have yourselves set in your high Cathedral towers reproaches your lack of love with its iron tongue , and summons you all to worship Him the Ever-Glorious , through whose mercy alone you live ! To and fro , -- to and fro , -- gravely persistent , sublimely eloquent , the huge , sustained , and heavy monotone went thudding through the stillness , -- till , startled from his profound sleep by such loud , lofty , and incessant clangor , Alwyn turned on his pillow and listened , half-aroused , half-bewildered , -- then , remembering where he was , he understood ; it was the great Bell of the Dom pealing forth its first summons to the earliest Mass. . He lay quiet for a little while , dreamily counting the number of reverberations each separate stroke sent quivering on the air , -- but presently , finding it impossible to sleep again , he got up , and drawing aside the curtain looked out of the window of his room , which fronted on the Platz . Though it was not yet six o'clock , the city was all astir , -- the Rhinelanders are an early working people , and to see the sun rise is not with them a mere fiction of poesy , but a daily fact . It was one of the loveliest of lovely spring mornings -- the sky was clear as a pale , polished sapphire , and every little bib of delicate carving and sculpture on the Dom stood out from its groundwork with microscopically beautiful distinctness . And as his gaze rested on the perfect fairness of the day , a strange and sudden sense of rapturous anticipation possessed his mind , -- he felt as one prepared for some high and exquisite happiness , -- some great and wondrous celebration or feast of joy ! The thoughts of death , on which he had brooded so persistently during the past yester-eve , had fled , leaving no trace behind , -- only a keen and vigorous delight in life absorbed him now .