The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning. With but half-formed
purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the city, and came
into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering awhile, heard the first
notes of the organ, and so entered. I believe it is more than thirty
years since I was in an English church on Christmas Day. The old time
and the old faces lived again for me; I saw myself on the far side of the
abyss of years--that self which is not myself at all, though I mark
points of kindred between the beings of then and now. He who in that
other world sat to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at
all--rapt in his own visions--or listened only as one in whose blood was
heresy. He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind,
distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive. More than
that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from their
dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the
other. "On earth peace, good-will to men"--already that line was among
the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its
rhythm, its sonority. Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for
the harmonic in thought and speech--and through what a tumult of
unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight his way!
To-day, I listen with no heretical promptings. The music, whether of
organ or of word, is more to me than ever; the literal meaning causes me
no restiveness. I felt only glad that I had yielded to the summons of
the Christmas bells. I sat among a congregation of shadows, not in the
great cathedral, but in a little parish church far from here. When I
came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread
on the moist earth; my dream expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey,
and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow. It is a piety to turn
awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose
Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude? I would not now, if I might,
be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices,
and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember. When I was
scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the fireside the
Christmas stanzas of "In Memoriam." To-night I have taken down the
volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me once again--read as
no other ever did, that voice which taught me to know poetry, the voice
which never spoke to me but of good and noble things. Would I have those
accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at
another time? Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.