which they professed had upon the lives of his people. His own life was
altogether guided by it: why could not theirs be the same? Why did they
go on all through the year swearing, cursing, drinking, quarrelling,
lying, stealing? He could not but perceive that they came to him to
confess their peccadilloes only that they might pursue them more
completely at their ease. He could not flatter himself that his
ministrations in Marca, which were now of six years' duration, had made
the village a whit different from what it had been when he had entered
it.

Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day, being
a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble bench
near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind the
pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured across the
paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the cypresses
which stood before the door, and found its way over the uneven slates of
the stone floor to his feet. A nightingale was singing somewhere in the
dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress-trees. Lizards ran from crack to crack
in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came through a hole in the
wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of perfume towards him. The
whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and light; the body of the
church behind him was quite dark.

He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read: he sat and
gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air, and
listened to the song of the nightingales in that dreamy trance which
made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his
parishioners, but which was only the meditation of a poetic temper,
cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not
educated or free enough to be able even to analyze what it felt.

"The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of April
and May," thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet, and to
whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear. "The very
phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the same: in spring
it is all a canticle like the Song of Solomon, in midsummer--what is it
he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is he only teaching his
young ones how they should sing next year?"

And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens earth.
The nightingale was patiently repeating his song, aga