Twice-told tales
invariably an old woman in black whose bent frame and rounded shoulders
are evidently laden with some heavy affliction which she is eager to
rest upon the altar. Would that the Sabbath came twice as often, for
the sake of that sorrowful old soul! There is an elderly man, also, who
arrives in good season and leans against the corner of the tower, just
within the line of its shadow, looking downward with a darksome brow. I
sometimes fancy that the old woman is the happier of the two. After
these, others drop in singly and by twos and threes, either
disappearing through the doorway or taking their stand in its vicinity.
At last, and always with an unexpected sensation, the bell turns in the
steeple overhead and throws out an irregular clangor, jarring the tower
to its foundation. As if there were magic in the sound, the sidewalks
of the street, both up and down along, are immediately thronged with
two long lines of people, all converging hitherward and streaming into
the church. Perhaps the far-off roar of a coach draws nearer—a deeper
thunder by its contrast with the surrounding stillness—until it sets
down the wealthy worshippers at the portal among their humblest
brethren. Beyond that entrance—in theory, at least—there are no
distinctions of earthly rank; nor, indeed, by the goodly apparel which
is flaunting in the sun would there seem to be such on the hither side.
Those pretty girls! Why will they disturb my pious meditations? Of all
days in the week, they should strive to look least fascinating on the
Sabbath, instead of heightening their mortal loveliness, as if to rival
the blessed angels and keep our thoughts from heaven. Were I the
minister himself, I must needs look. One girl is white muslin from the
waist upward and black silk downward to her slippers; a second blushes
from top-knot to shoe-tie, one universal scarlet; another shines of a
pervading yellow, as if she had made a garment of the sunshine. The
greater part, however, have adopted a milder cheerfulness of hue. Their
veils, especially when the wind raises them, give a lightness to the
general effect and make them appear like airy phantoms as they flit up
the steps and vanish into the sombre doorway. Nearly all—though it is
very strange that I should know it—wear white stockings, white as snow,
and neat slippers laced crosswise with black ribbon pretty high above
the ankles. A white stocking is infinitely more effective than a black
one.
Here comes the clergyman, slow and solemn, in severe simplicity,
needing no black silk gown to denote his office. His aspect claims my
reverence, but cannot win my love. Were I to picture Saint Peter
keeping fast the gate of Heaven and frowning, more stern than pitiful,
on the wretched applicants, that face should be my study. By middle
age, or sooner, the creed has generally wrought upon the heart or been
attempered by it. As the minister passes into the church the bell holds
its iron tongue and all the low murmur of the congregation dies away.
The gray sexton looks up and down the street and then at my
window-curtain, where through the small peephole I half fancy that he
has caught my eye. Now every loiterer has gone in and the street lies
asleep in the quiet sun, while a feeling of loneliness comes over me,
and brings also an uneasy sense of neglected privileges and duties. Oh,
I ought to have gone to church! The bustle of the rising congregation
reaches my ears. They are standing up to pray. Could I bring my heart
into unison with those who are praying in yonder church and lift it
heavenward with a fervor of supplication, but no distinct request,
would not that be the safest kind of prayer?—“Lord, look down upon me
in mercy!” With that sentiment gushing from my soul, might I not leave
all the rest to him?
Hark! the hymn! This, at least, is a portion of the service which I can
enjoy better than if I sat within the walls, where the full choir and
the massive melody of the organ would fall with a weight upon me. At
this distance it thrills through my frame and plays upon my
heart-strings with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit. Heaven be
praised! I know nothing of music as a science, and the most elaborate
harmonies, if they please me, please as simply as a nurse’s lullaby.
The strain has ceased, but prolongs itself in my mind with fanciful
echoes till I start from my reverie and find that the sermon has
commenced. It is my misfortune seldom to fructify in a regular way by
any but printed sermons. The first strong idea which the preacher
utters gives birth to a train of thought and leads me onward step by
step quite out of hearing of the good man’s voice unless he be indeed a
son of thunder. At my open window, catching now and then a sentence of
the “parson’s saw,” I am as well situated as at the foot of the pulpit
stairs. The broken and scattered fragments of this one discourse will
be the texts of many sermons preached by those colleague
pastors—colleagues, but often disputants—my Mind and Heart. The former
pretends to be a scholar and perplexes me with doctrinal points; the
latter takes me on the score of feeling; and both, like several other
preachers, spend their strength to very little purpose. I, their sole
auditor, cannot always understand them.
Suppose that a few hours have passed, and behold me still behind my
curtain just before the close of the afternoon service. The hour-hand
on the dial has passed beyond four o’clock. The declining sun is hidden
behind the steeple and throws its shadow straight across the street; so
that my chamber is darkened as with a cloud. Around the church door all
is solitude, and an impenetrable obscurity beyond the threshold. A
commotion is heard. The seats are slammed down and the pew doors thrown
back; a multitude of feet are trampling along the unseen aisles, and
the congregation bursts suddenly through the portal. Foremost scampers
a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense and dark phalanx of grown
men, and lastly a crowd of females with young children and a few
scattered husbands. This instantaneous outbreak of life into loneliness
is one of the pleasantest scenes of the day. Some of the good people
are rubbing their eyes, thereby intimating that they have been wrapped,
as it were, in a sort of holy trance by the fervor of their devotion.
There is a young man, a third-rate coxcomb, whose first care is always
to flourish a white handkerchief and brush the seat of a tight pair of
black silk pantaloons which shine as if varnished. They must have been
made of the stuff called “everlasting,” or perhaps of the same piece as
Christian’s garments in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, for he put them on
two summers ago and has not yet worn the gloss off. I have taken a
great liking to those black silk pantaloons. But now, with nods and
greetings among friends, each matron takes her husband’s arm and paces
gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away after arranging
sunset walks with their favored bachelors. The Sabbath eve is the eve
of love. At length the whole congregation is dispersed. No; here, with
faces as glossy as black satin, come two sable ladies and a sable
gentleman, and close in their rear the minister, who softens his severe
visage and bestows a kind word on each. Poor souls! To them the most
captivating picture of bliss in heaven is “There we shall be white!”
All is solitude again. But hark! A broken warbling of voices, and now,
attuning its grandeur to their sweetness, a stately peal of the organ.
Who are the choristers? Let me dream that the angels who came down from
heaven this blessed morn to blend themselves with the worship of the
truly good are playing and singing their farewell to the earth. On the
wings of that rich melody they were borne upward.
This, gentle reader, is merely a flight of poetry. A few of the
singing-men and singing-women had lingered behind their fellows and
raised their voices fitfully and blew a careless note upon the organ.
Yet it lifted my soul higher than all their former strains. They are
gone—the sons and daughters of Music—and the gray sexton is just
closing the portal. For six days more there will be no face of man in
the pews and aisles and galleries, nor a voice in the pulpit, nor music
in the choir. Was it worth while to rear this massive edifice to be a
desert in the heart of the town and populous only for a few hours of
each seventh day? Oh, but the church is a symbol of religion. May its
site, which was consecrated on the day when the first tree was felled,
be kept holy for ever, a spot of solitude and peace amid the trouble
and vanity of our week-day world! There is a moral, and a religion too,
even in the silent walls. And may the steeple still point heavenward
and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the Sabbath morn!
THE WEDDING-KNELL
There is a certain church, in the city of New York which I have always
regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there
solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother’s
girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene,
and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now
standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I
am not antiquarian enough to know, nor would it be worth while to
correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error by reading the date of
its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church
surrounded by an enclosure of the loveliest green, within which appear
urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the
tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic
dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath
its tower, one would be willing to connect some legendary interest.
The marriage might be considered as the result of an early engagement,
though there had been two intermediate weddings on the lady’s part and
forty years of celibacy on that of the gentleman. At sixty-five Mr.
Ellenwood was a shy but not quite a secluded man; selfish, like all men
who brood over their own hearts, yet manifesting on rare occasions a
vein of generous sentiment; a scholar throughout life, though always an
indolent one, because his studies had no definite object either of
public advantage or personal ambition; a gentleman, high-bred and
fastidiously delicate, yet sometimes requiring a considerable
relaxation in his behalf of the common rules of society. In truth,
there were so many anomalies in his character, and, though shrinking
with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality
so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of
conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of
insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin
in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in
feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he were
mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and
abortive life.
The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bridegroom in
everything but age as can well be conceived. Compelled to relinquish
her first engagement, she had been united to a man of twice her own
years, to whom she became an exemplary wife, and by whose death she was
left in possession of a splendid fortune. A Southern gentleman
considerably younger than herself succeeded to her hand and carried her
to Charleston, where after many uncomfortable years she found herself
again a widow. It would have been singular if any uncommon delicacy of
feeling had survived through such a life as Mrs. Dabney’s; it could not
but be crushed and killed by her early disappointment, the cold duty of
her first marriage, the dislocation of the heart’s principles