Besides the itinerant lecturer, and the permanent library, we have the Sunday sermon.  These sum up the intellectual aids and furtherances of the whole place.  We have a church and a chapel, and I attend both.  The Dreamthorp people are Dissenters, for the most part; why, I never could understand; because dissent implies a certain intellectual effort.  But Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely to remain.  In an ungainly building, filled with hard gaunt pews, without an organ, without a touch of colour in the windows, with nothing to stir the imagination or the devotional sense, the simple people worship.  On Sunday, they are put upon a diet of spiritual bread and water.  Personally, I should desire more generous food.  But the labouring people listen attentively, till once they fall asleep, and they wake up to receive the benediction with a feeling of having done their duty.  They know they ought to go to chapel, and they go.  I go likewise, from habit, although I have long ago lost the power of following a discourse.  In my pew, and whilst the clergyman is going on, I think of the strangest things—­of the tree at the window, of the congregation of the dead outside, of the wheat-fields and the corn-fields beyond and all around.  And the odd thing is, that it is during sermon only that my mind flies off at a tangent and busies itself with things removed from the place and the circumstances.  Whenever it is finished fancy returns from her wanderings, and I am alive to the objects around me.  The clergyman knows my humour, and is good Christian enough to forgive me; and he smiles good-humouredly when I ask him to let me have the chapel keys, that I may enter, when in the mood, and preach a sermon to myself.  To my mind, an empty chapel is impressive; a crowded one, comparatively a commonplace affair.  Alone, I could choose my own text, and my silent discourse would not be without its practical applications.

An idle life I live in this place, as the world counts it; but then I have the satisfaction of differing from the world as to the meaning of idleness.  A windmill twirling its arms all day is admirable only when there is corn to grind.  Twirling its arms for the mere barren pleasure of twirling them, or for the sake of looking busy, does not deserve any rapturous paean of praise.  I must be made happy after my own fashion, not after the fashion of other people.  Here I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on the neck of my whim.  Here I play with my own thoughts; here I ripen for the grave.

ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS