h 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 ca