University of Virginia Library

Sat in his inn after breakfast a lean little man with the look,
Withered and shrunk, of one whose moisture was dried, like a brook
Where the sun burns hot in the tropics; but now he was home once more
In the place where he first drew breath near the sands of the North Sea shore:
And he held in his hand a “poster,” big-lettered in black and red,
Which he read with a cynical sneer; then low to himself he said:
“Service begins at eleven, but the door will be open at ten”:
That means a crush to get in, with screaming of women, and men
Barely just kept from swearing by dread of the Sabbath day,
And swearing the more in their hearts; it were better for women to stay
At home, and see to their children, instead of losing their wits
Crushed in a trampling crowd, till they go off in fainting fits.

No, I'll not face it. How should I sit still in a narrow pew
For an hour, with my legs a-cramp, and with nothing on earth to do
But stare at the white-washed walls, and gasp for a mouthful of air,
And smell the hot peppermint breaths, and the oil in the young bucks' hair,
And watch how faces grow purple, and bald heads are smoking like censers?
Nay, I will sit by the fire here, and read that last volume of Spencer's.
There's more in a sentence of his than in all that this fellow can say,
Though he preach for an hour by the clock.” So he kicked his boots out of the way.
That was his first thought. But hardly had he reached out for his book,
And settled him down in an easy chair in the cosiest nook,
With a big cigar in his mouth, and the cloud-smoke round his head
Curling in wavy rings, when once more he looked up and said—
“Yet we were fellows at College together, and friends too once,
This famous preacher and I, and he was not a bit of a dunce,
But fairly well up in his classics, though logic was always his forte;
A rare, good hand at debate, ever prompt with a clever retort;
Not very strong in science, but skilled with his pen to write,
And making his half-dark thinking clearer than other men's light;
A smart rhetorician truly, with a ready tongue in his head,
Though he looked so clumsy and loutish, and homespun and country-bred.
He is starring it here, as I learn; has come to revive their faith,
To stir up the fire whose embers were smouldering nigh unto death.
I care not much for your stars; and for starring parsons least;
The better they are at that, they have less the true heart of a priest.
But they say that he gave up a living to be free to go here and there,
Where a boat was wrecked, or the Devil broke loose at a rural fair,
Or where the state of religion needed a trumpet blast
To rouse them up from the sleep into which their souls had been cast
By the abundance of bread.—A queer sort of life, no doubt;
But everyone to his taste.—So, freely he goes about,
And passes now for a great man. That means not much, I allow;
Once great men took to the Church, but they're somewhat scarce there now—
One-eyed men among blind folk. Still he is followed by throngs,
And speaks, they say, to the age of its duties, its rights and its wrongs;
Not pulpit commonplaces—the leaden tokens they mint
For everyday use—but sayings newspapers are fain to print,
Eloquent, flowing periods balanced and pointed like sonnets,
And his pews are crowded with heads too, not with mere ribbons and bonnets.
That's what they tell me, at least, and they say that you even shall grin,
Now and then, at the hits which he makes when describing a popular sin.
I do not much care for humour or wit in the house of prayer;
'Tis so easy with smallest of jokes to spread ripples of laughter there:
But yes! I must go, after all, and hear what the man has to say:
He was not a fool, and I daresay it will be as good as a play.
'Twill be very bad if it is not, as plays go now. Ah me!
How the bloom and the gloss get rubbed off everything here that we see!”
So he threw down his book with a grumble, and out of the room he strode,
Not quite in the mood for a mortal to go to the house of God.

A brilliant midsummer day, with a glorious sun in the blue,
Though clouds were massing all round it, lurid and sultry in hue,
And there was not a breath to stir the thirsty and drooping leaves,
And all the wild flowers were alive with the hum of the honey-thieves,
And the larks were hurrying fast through their morning songs, as if they
Dreaded that something might mar them before high noon of the day.
There was more than a Sabbath hush in the listless fields, as he passed
Leisurely into the town, whither groups were hurrying fast
By twos and threes and dozens, like rills and streams that flowed
Together at last in a river along the great high road.

It turned out all as he pictured—the crush at the narrow door,
The screaming and fainting of women—but nobody cursed or swore—
The squeeze in the straight high pews, the crowd packed close in the aisles,
The blaze of peony faces, and glimmer of ghastly smiles,
The reeking and moping of bald heads, the coughing and taking of snuff:
Yet were they grave too, and patient. It was God's house: that was enough.

How well he remembered it all—that quaint old chapel of ease,
With its high-pitched pulpit, facing the high deep galleries,
And the sounding-board overhead, and the dove with the olive branch,
And the votive ship that was hung up in memory of the launch
Of the first of the Greenland whalers that out of the harbour sailed.
Proud was the gallant skipper of the port from which he hailed,
And the kirk where he had been christened, and the ship where he held command,
And the minister whom he reckoned the foremost in all the land:
And he modelled his ship, and hung it, hull and rigging and block—
He had married the minister's daughter—right over the gilded clock.
They were sturdy Protestants all there, yet they saw not the deadly sin
Of a votive ship in the Church, nor the evils it might bring in.
It was not like vowing candles, or hanging up waxen limbs
In honour of healing saints, with chaunting of prayers and hymns:
And it grew to be almost sacred in all men's memories,
When ship and skipper were crushed in the ice-packed Greenland seas.

But more than the high-pitched pulpit, and the dove and the olive twig,
And more than the many-sparred whaler, so neat and trim in its rig,
And the great square pew where the elders spread out their long coat-tails—
It was lined with green baize, handsome, and studded with bright brass nails—
More than all to the stranger was the pew where he used to sit—
They filled it once with a household, now he knew not a face in it.
But, as he looked, he saw there brothers and sisters true
All in their order duly ranged in the old church pew;
Here at the door the father, guiding his flock with a look,
Each in his Sunday raiment, each with a well-clasped book,
While the pale mother sat at the farther end, and he,
The youngest, cuddled beside her, or nestled him on her knee.
Wet or dry, they must be there, morning and afternoon,
Ere the bell had ceased to tinkle, or the clerk gave out the tune;
And woe to him that came late, or who drowsily slept a wink,
Or lost a head of the sermon, or dared of his play to think,
Or fidgeted for a moment, weary of stiff constraint!
It all came back on him now, with humour and pathos blent,
And a something moist in his eye that somehow dimmed his view,
As he thought, where now are they all that sat in the old church pew?
Some at the ends of the earth, some farther even than they—
Low in the quiet graves, by the surfbeaten sandy bay.
Then he drew himself up, and muttered, Pshaw! why should I yield to this?
I am a man of the world, and not a sentimental miss?

I tell the tale as he told it me in the parlour inn at night,
As we sat and smoked together by a guttering candle-light.

After sitting well-nigh for an hour, he said, with a mind to go,
Could I only have seen my way, but the close-packed throng said No;
There was not room for an eel to wriggle itself outside,
So I shifted and shifted my legs, and a change of torture tried;
That was the most you could hope for, one side or other must be
Prickly and stinging, or cramped and dead from the foot to the knee;
At last the minister entered, a handsome fellow enough,
Not like the country lout I had known in his homespun rough;
Butterfly is not less like its caterpillar than he
Looked like the memory of him I'd carried about with me.
Then he was ruddy and strong, and now he was pale and thin—
Was it with brooding of thought, or penance endured for sin?
Spectacled too, though once he had seen like a bird of prey
That from its rock-nest watches the near and the far away;
Whiskers trimmed to a hair, and hair in a wavy curl,
While every tooth in his mouth was white as a several pearl.
He had the cleverest hands, too, alive to their finger-tips,
Could make them speak to you plainly as ever he did with his lips:
And his voice was mellow and deep, and clear and full as a bell,
And touched in the higher tones a passionate thrill and swell.
Perfect in rhetoric truly, verging on something more,
Could he only have boldly ventured, and cut right into the core;
Not much amiss with the thought too, or wrong in the argument,
Could he only have once forgotten he had to be eloquent.

He read like a man who well had conned the words that he read,
Giving the meaning clear; and his prayers were fine, they said:
Likely I am no judge, but I thought them a shade too fine;
Rhetoric is not for God, any more than are pearls for swine.
The voice, too, was more than the thought; and I asked myself sometimes, What
Can any one find there, now, for his voice to be quavering at?
But prayers, I allow, are not a kind of literature
In which I can boast any skill, or quite of my taste be sure;
Only one fancies, if earth and its praise could be left out of view,
And the soul looked straight up to God—well, its words would be simple and few,
While his were many and dainty, and every one said they were fine.
Perhaps they were real: who knows? but I could not quite use them as mine.
Then he gave out his text from the Psalm: “The fool hath said in his heart,
No God!” and after a pause, with a stroke of excellent art,
Repeated the three words “Fool!—No God!” 'mid a breathless awe—
An orator's trick, of course, yet a palpable hit, one saw.
Pity he did not stop there; just that look, that tone!
Why, they were in themselves a sermon, had they only been left alone
To hint their many suggestions. But some men have a way
Of not knowing when to stop, and of unsaying what they say.

That would have been the effect of his eloquence then upon me,
Had the sermon ever been finished, which it was not fated to be.
For mainly it was but a weft of Paley, and woof of Paul,
Calico-printed with anecdotes, wholly apocryphal,
Of Shelley and Hume and Voltaire, set forth with manifest trick,
Clever enough in its way, of artfulest rhetoric.
Not that there were not at times touches of something higher,
When the man's own soul broke out, with gleams of a central fire,
Through the crust of his pulpiteering; also there were some strokes
Of a grim satirical humour—they were not exactly jokes,
More like Elijah's biting scorn of the Prophets of Baal,
Or the ring of the spear of Ithuriel, smiting the steel-clasped mail
Of Satan. They were the bits of the sermon that I liked best:
I seemed to look on the devil discomfited then with a jest
Wholly sincere and natural. But that only came now and then;
And after a while I was wishing me home at mine inn again,
With that latest volume of Spencer's, and wondering what came next,
When something went crack! somewhere, as the minister quoted his text
To clench a paragraph with; and surely the gallery swayed
Forward a bit, and the startled crowd rose up dismayed.
A horrible moment that, when murderous panic appears,
That tramples on pity, and heeds not grey hairs or the tenderest years,
Nor kith nor kin nor aught, but the wretched self it would save,
At the cost of its better self, from the coward-dreaded grave!
They had sprung to their feet, and stood a moment in breathless fear,
So silent that out on the roof the rain was plain to hear
Which now was heavily falling; and then there arose a scream
That curdled the blood in the heart, and I saw, as it were in a dream,
Faces of men and women ghastly with terror, and all
The galleries swaying, I fancied, away from the solid wall.
But ere the fatal rush, the minister lifted high
A tremulous hand to heaven—a jewelled one, by the by—
And sang, in a loud, clear voice, one verse of a well-known psalm,
Joined in by some few near, which brought back a moment's calm;
Then he cried out, “Do not fear; not a hair of your heads shall fall
If you do as I bid; for God has given me the lives of all.
Let no one stir, till I tell you the doors are opened wide,
Then silently go, while I pray that the Lord may meet with us outside.”
That wrought like a spell on them; he was not like a man inspired,
Yet the people gravely and silently did as he had desired,
Slow moving along the aisles, and down by the narrow stair,
Out by the several doors, and into the open air,
In their disciplined self-command which their faith to them had given.
Mean while in the pulpit he kept praying for them to heaven,
Not at all “fine prayers” now, but the downright honest cry
Of a man who longed and hoped that the poor folk might not die.
I did not hurry myself, for I did not lose my head;
But when the last had vanished, I drew a long breath, and said,
“Well done, Parson and people! That was a sight to see,
And better than any preachment the man could have preached to me.”
For as they stood outside, ere taking their homeward ways,
They sang to the Shepherd whose mercy had followed them all their days.
Then, when the church was empty, straight into the vestry he went
By the door behind the pulpit, and I followed him, for I meant
Partly to compliment him on the ready wit he had shown,
Partly to claim acquaintance, as a friend in the days long gone.
But he hailed me at once by name, for mine was the one face he knew,
So he said, in the thronging crowd, as he glanced from pew to pew;
And where had I been? and had I come back to the old Home again,
After long years of wandering far in the sun and the rain?
And was he not glad to meet me, and to recall the times
When we pored over Homer and Euclid, or hammered our brains for rhymes?
It was pleasant to get such a greeting—so cordial, cheery, and frank—
Like what you may find in your banker, when your balance is good at the bank.
I was yielding then to the kindly feeling we have for those
We have known at school or at college; and, thinking of hardish blows
And rough horse-play he had borne from some of us then, I felt
Some twinges of sharp regret, and my heart was beginning to melt,
When there passed across his features a smile as of self-content,
And I stayed the relenting mood, till I found out what it meant.
“Now, tell me,” he said, “was that not a right smart stroke of mine,
To sing that verse of a psalm which they all knew, line by line?
It saved some score of their lives, and will be a good thing too for me,
For the crowds will be bigger than ever wherever I happen to be.
It was quite an impromptu thought, an inspiration plain,
Like a burst of sunshine gleaming out of the clouds and rain;
A minute more, and the throng would have trampled the old and the weak,
Though I was not very much frightened—old joisting is apt to creak,
And seats will crack with a weight they have not borne for years;
But how people lose their heads, to be sure, in their panic fears!
It is lucky for me, however. Somehow, I was losing my hold
Of the folk, and my tellingest hits seemed to fall on them lifeless and cold;
And there needed much advertising—which means a heavy expense—
To gather a crowd worth speaking to, even on Sabbath. Hence
I was thinking what could be done—it must be striking and new—
To waken their interest in the things that are right and true.
But this now will set me up quite; they will talk of it all through the week,
And I shall have congratulations, and invitations to speak
Every evening at meetings in town and village, when they
Read in the morning paper what happened in church to-day.

“I never could settle down to a millhorse round,” he said,
“Of writing a weekly sermon, and visiting each sick-bed,
Catechising the children, and comforting them that mourn,
Blessing the young folk's weddings, and christening their babes when born.
I tried it, of course, for a while; but I very soon came to see,
Though it might be all right for some folk, it was not the work for me.
Would you yoke your racehorse to a plough? My calling was clearly to preach,
To put new fire in our pulpits, and rouse every heart I could reach
By the art of the Orator, skilled to move now, and now to persuade,
Leaving the task of the pastor to men of a commoner grade.
Therefore, I have to be popular, have to be followed by throngs,
And to hit at the sins of Dives, cry out at the poor man's wrongs,
And drop the hum-drum of the pulpit, and maybe to startle men's ears—
For no one would heed what I said, if I did not bring laughter or tears.
Does it win any souls for God? you are fain to know; does it make
Men's lives any purer and truer? or souls from their bondage break,
And walk in the freedom of Right? Who knows? It is ours to sow
The seed of the kingdom; and God, He only can make it to grow.
I leave that to Him. Now and then, in the heat or the hush of a crowd,
One will go off in a faint, and one will take to screaming aloud;
But if their lives are bettered, I wot not. In every fight
There are scores of bullets that miss, for one that kills outright.
No doubt the vanities flourish, and sins are not less rife;
I plant and water, but man cannot quicken to newness of life.
Why do I yet hold on to a fruitless task? But is it
So fruitless, sir, after all? These folk will remember my visit
Here now, and talk of that psalm, I believe, till the day they die.
You would wonder how many things happen to make them reckon that I
Am surely a chosen vessel whom it will be good to hear.
So, God has often sustained me, when my heart was faint with fear,
And made me feel that He means me still to be doing His work,
Dealing out bread to the hungry, and rousing a slumbering Kirk.

“Yet I admit there are times when doubts do trouble me sore.
'Tis not like a full day's work, this preaching an hour or more,
And I don't write sermons often—the old ones do as well
When the place is new, and it's likely there's no one there could tell
If they be old or new. Much study is hard on me, too,
And I have to be careful of health. Life is precious. But if you knew
My thoughts now and then, you would not envy this popular fame
Which musters its thousands just at the trumpet-call of my name.
For oft when I take up one of these sermons so carefully writ,
All of them yellow with use, and glance at an eloquent bit,
Meant for some passing event, which told very well at the time,
The pathos seems to have vanished, and it sounds without reason or rhyme,
And I ask myself, How will it look, when the reckoning comes, to say,
There, that's all the fruit of my vineyard—the harvest of my poor day?
Five score, more or less, of old sermons! And then, when my spirits were low,
I have wished I had stuck to the croft where my father made barley to grow
Instead of the rush and the ling. But of course, that was foolish, and came
Of a jaded mind, and the strong recoil of an o'er-tasked frame
Strained by emotional fervour. No, I can never repent
Choosing the grandest of missions, on which the Apostles were sent,
To preach the great gospel of peace.— I know not if you will care
To wait on the afternoon sermon?” I told him I could not be there;
But I would remember the plate—The workman was worthy his hire—
So we parted, never to meet, at least if I get my desire.

What a life that fellow must live! half knowing himself for the lie
That he is, like the old Roman augurs that joked at their craft on the sly;
But he has not even that help to relieve his troubled mind,
He must try to believe he believes, and therein his comfort find.
Hard for a small pretender to be preaching a faith that hates
Hypocrites more than downright sinners, and nothing abates
For one's poor circumstances, but will have a man to play
The hero, who has not a touch of the hero to moisten his clay.
Yes, I am sorry for him. How well now he managed that job—
The singing and praying, and slow clearing out of the terrified mob!
I wish that I had not gone after him into the vestry; so
I might have believed in him now,— for it is not good to know
That your very worst thoughts of men are the truest after all.
And when you've painted a hero, 'twere best turn his face to the wall:
You made him, and, if you would keep him, you must not look closely at him,
Though, I grant you, that life feels poor when the glow and the glory grow dim.
Ah well! I gave him his hire—to put in the plate, no doubt—
But I'd give it him ten times over not to have found him out.