A Laodicean: A Story of To-day | Page 6

colt springs upward, across the circle, stops,
flies over the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of
graceful antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted
whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity of a
horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of the bold
contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process is
considered to be the making of him.
Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of the
inevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with the
artistic side of his profession only, it would be premature to say; but at
any rate it was his contrite return to architecture as a calling that sent
him on the sketching excursion under notice. Feeling that something
still was wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his
professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his own
native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected
from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome
iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to
silence; indeed--such is the surprising instability of art 'principles' as
they are facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sink into the
neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times. This
accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an additional charm
to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it the business of a
summer circuit in the west.

The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusually
gorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter of the
heavens in which the sun had disappeared, were such as to make a
traveller loiter on his walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted
himself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. The
evening was so still that every trifling sound could be heard for miles.
There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the smacks of
the waggoner's whip: the team must have been at least three miles off.
From far over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds;
while from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play in
the twilight. Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from the
direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him; and he
thought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.
But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by the
pressure of their material presence, and Somerset's thoughts were often,
to his great loss, apt to be even more than common truants from the
tones and images that met his outer senses on walks and rides. He
would sometimes go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most
extraordinary town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not
meddle with him by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen,
mongrels, bad smells, and such like obstructions. This feat of
questionable utility he began performing now. Sitting on the three-inch
ash rail that had been peeled and polished like glass by the rubbings of
all the small-clothes in the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot
that it was August--in short, everything of the present altogether. His
mind flew back to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had
resulted from his not having been able to make up his mind which of
the many fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic
change was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered
from the modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any
living man of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and
experience, who had never thought specially of the matter, but had
blunderingly applied themselves to whatever form of art confronted
them at the moment of their making a move, were by this time
acquiring renown as new lights; while he was still unknown. He wished
that some accident could have hemmed in his eyes between inexorable
blinkers, and sped him on in a channel ever so worn.

Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future,
he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiar
hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened
more heedfully. It was his old friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had
never once heard since the lisping days of childhood, and whose
existence, much as it had then been to him, he had till this moment
quite forgotten. Where the 'New Sabbath' had