wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree's green heart!

. . . . . . . .

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
past! Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain. To the door,
to the door, with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may
talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has
been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with
its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that
thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would
speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so
dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my
favour wrought for it on my bed at night. Can you see the device on
the badge? I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess--'_bad
ware nicht_'--is not that the humour of it?

. . . . . . . . .

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where
the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay
on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet
dead in the kirkyard--some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some
dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for
threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but
what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts,
among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me,
thin and solitary, through the open windows; _if I were what I was
yesterday_, _and what_, _before God_, _I shall be again to-morrow_,
_how should I outface these brazen memories_, _how live down this
unclean resurrection of dead hopes_!"

Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is
assertive. Take here the cunning sentences on _Selfishness and Egotism_,
very Hawthornian yet quite original:

"An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily
loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There
is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his
sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a
force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish. But egotism is
a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is
un