Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood | Page 3

falling, and the steam of it is
rising? when the river is crawling along muddily, and the horses stand
stock-still in the meadows with their spines in a straight line from the
ears to where they fail utterly in the tails? I should only put on goloshes
now, and think of the days when I despised damp. Ah! it was mental
waterproof that I needed then; for let me despise damp as much as I
would, I could neither keep it out of my mind, nor help suffering the
spiritual rheumatism which it occasioned. Now, the damp never gets
farther than my goloshes and my Macintosh. And for that worst kind of
rheumatism--I never feel it now.
But I had begun to tell you about that first evening.--I had arrived at the
vicarage the night before, and it had rained all day, and was still raining,
though not so much. I took my umbrella and went out.
For as I wanted to do my work well (everything taking far more the
shape of work to me, then, and duty, than it does now--though, even
now, I must confess things have occasionally to be done by the
clergyman because there is no one else to do them, and hardly from
other motive than a sense of duty,--a man not being able to shirk work
because it may happen to be dirty)--I say, as I wanted to do my work
well, or rather, perhaps, because I dreaded drudgery as much as any
poor fellow who comes to the treadmill in consequence--I wanted to
interest myself in it; and therefore I would go and fall in love, first of
all, if I could, with the country round about. And my first step beyond
my own gate was up to the ankles, in mud.
Therewith, curiously enough, arose the distracting thought how I could
possibly preach TWO good sermons a Sunday to the same people,
when one of the sermons was in the afternoon instead of the evening, to
which latter I had been accustomed in the large town in which I had

formerly officiated as curate in a proprietary chapel. I, who had
declaimed indignantly against excitement from without, who had been
inclined to exalt the intellect at the expense even of the heart, began to
fear that there must be something in the darkness, and the gas-lights,
and the crowd of faces, to account for a man's being able to preach a
better sermon, and for servant girls preferring to go out in the evening.
Alas! I had now to preach, as I might judge with all probability
beforehand, to a company of rustics, of thought yet slower than of
speech, unaccustomed in fact to THINK at all, and that in the sleepiest,
deadest part of the day, when I could hardly think myself, and when, if
the weather should be at all warm, I could not expect many of them to
be awake. And what good might I look for as the result of my labour?
How could I hope in these men and women to kindle that fire which, in
the old days of the outpouring of the Spirit, made men live with the
sense of the kingdom of heaven about them, and the expectation of
something glorious at hand just outside that invisible door which lay
between the worlds?
I have learned since, that perhaps I overrated the spirituality of those
times, and underrated, not being myself spiritual enough to see all
about me, the spirituality of these times. I think I have learned since,
that the parson of a parish must be content to keep the upper windows
of his mind open to the holy winds and the pure lights of heaven; and
the side windows of tone, of speech, of behaviour open to the earth, to
let forth upon his fellow-men the tenderness and truth which those
upper influences bring forth in any region exposed to their operation.
Believing in his Master, such a servant shall not make haste; shall feel
no feverous desire to behold the work of his hands; shall be content to
be as his Master, who waiteth long for the fruits of His earth.
But surely I am getting older than I thought; for I keep wandering away
from my subject, which is this, my first walk in my new cure. My
excuse is, that I want my reader to understand something of the state of
my mind, and the depression under which I was labouring. He will
perceive that I desired to do some work worth calling by the name of
work, and that I did not see how to get hold of a beginning.
I had not gone far from my own gate before the rain ceased, though it
was still gloomy