Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/76

Rh into which art has breathed its soul. First in Winchester Cathedral, then at Westminster Abbey, and now at this old royal chapel. The daily service appointed by the Church was performing with the careless and heartless air of prescription. The clergyman and clerk hurried sing-songing through the forte of prayers, that, perfect as they are, will only rise on the soul's wings. I felt the Puritan struggling at my heart, and could have broken out with old Mause's fervour, if not her eloquence. I thought of our summer Sunday service in dear J.'s "long parlour." Not a vacant place there. The door open into the garden, the children strewed round the doorstep, their young faces touched with an expression of devotion and love such as glows in the faces of the cherubs of the old pictures; and for vaulted roof, columns, and storied glass, we had the blue sky, the everlasting hills, and lights and shadows playing over them, all suggestive of devotion, and in harmony with the pure and simple doctrine our friend Dr. Follen taught us. To me, there was more true worship in those all-embracing words "Our Father!" as he uttered them, than in all the task-prayers I have heard in these mighty cathedrals. Here it is the temple that is greatest. Your mind is preoccupied, filled with the outward world. The monuments of past ages and the memorials of individual greatness are before you. Your existence is amplified; your sympathies are carried far back; the "inexorable past" does give up its dead. Wherever your eye falls you see the work of a power new to you—the creative power