He went slowly through the churchyard, breathing deep breaths of the delicious spring-morning air.  Rain-drops were sparkling all over the grassy graves, and in the hollows of the stones they had gathered in pools.  The eyes of the death-heads were full of water, as if weeping at the defeat of their master.  Every now and then a soft little wind awoke, like a throb of the spirit of life, and shook together the scattered drops upon the trees, and then down came diamond showers on the grass and daisies of the mounds, and fed the green moss in the letters of the epitaphs.  Over all the sun was shining, as if everywhere and forever spring was the order of things.  And is it not so?  Is not the idea of the creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer?  It seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing over the graves.  From such moods his heart recoiled.  To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have been treacherous.  No grave was to him the place where a friend was lying; it was but a cenotaph—­the place where the Lord had lain.

“Let those possessed with demons haunt the tombs,” he said, as he sat down in the pulpit; “for me, I will turn my back upon them with the risen Christ.  Yes, friend, I hear you!  I know what you say!  You have more affection than I? you can not forsake the last resting-place of the beloved?  Well, you may have more feeling than I; there is no gauge by which I can tell, and if there were, it would be useless:  we are as God made us.—­No, I will not say that:  I will say rather, I am as God is making me, and I shall one day be as He has made me.  Meantime I know that He will have me love my enemy tenfold more than now I love my friend.  Thou believest that the malefactor—­ah, there was faith now!  Of two men dying together in agony and shame, the one beseeches of the other the grace of a king!  Thou believest, I say—­at least thou professest to believe that the malefactor was that very day with Jesus in Paradise, and yet thou broodest over thy friend’s grave, gathering thy thoughts about the pitiful garment he left behind him, and letting himself drift away into the unknown, forsaken of all but thy vaguest, most shapeless thinkings!  Tell me not thou fearest to enter there whence has issued no revealing.  It is God who gives thee thy mirror of imagination, and if thou keep it clean, it will give thee back no shadow but of the truth.  Never a cry of love went forth from human heart but it found some heavenly chord to fold it in.  Be sure thy friend inhabits a day not out of harmony with this morning of earthly spring, with this sunlight, those rain-drops, that sweet wind that flows so softly over his grave.”

It was the first sprouting of a germon.  He covered it up and left it:  he had something else to talk to his people about this morning.