Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.
I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?—I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that Superstition[1] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of memory; at all events, one does forget a thousand things belonging to this world
The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd, suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was—drinking (in the Parsonage),—music-making (in
- ↑ This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also a Roman one. Cicero de Senectute.
