XIX.

The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning.  With but half-formed purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the city, and came into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering awhile, heard the first notes of the organ, and so entered.  I believe it is more than thirty years since I was in an English church on Christmas Day.  The old time and the old faces lived again for me; I saw myself on the far side of the abyss of years—­that self which is not myself at all, though I mark points of kindred between the beings of then and now.  He who in that other world sat to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at all—­rapt in his own visions—­or listened only as one in whose blood was heresy.  He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind, distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive.  More than that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from their dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the other.  “On earth peace, good-will to men”—­already that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority.  Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech—­and through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight his way!

To-day, I listen with no heretical promptings.  The music, whether of organ or of word, is more to me than ever; the literal meaning causes me no restiveness.  I felt only glad that I had yielded to the summons of the Christmas bells.  I sat among a congregation of shadows, not in the great cathedral, but in a little parish church far from here.  When I came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread on the moist earth; my dream expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey, and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow.  It is a piety to turn awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude?  I would not now, if I might, be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices, and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember.  When I was scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the fireside the Christmas stanzas of “In Memoriam.”  To-night I have taken down the volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me once again—­read as no other ever did, that voice which taught me to know poetry, the voice which never spoke to me but of good and noble things.  Would I have those accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at another time?  Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.

XX.