Page:The Heart of England.djvu/62

 nasal lesson and humming prayer. Then comes the hymn:—

One woman's ambitious, shrill treble voice that seems ever about to fall and yet continues to maintain its airy height, leads the congregation to unusual adventures of song. The church is dense with emotion; ordinary gentlemen, shopkeepers, labourers and their wives, men and women of all degrees of endurance, chivalry, good intention, uncertain aims, sentimental virtuousness, hypocrisy not dissevered from hardship, vanity not ignorant of tenderness, hard ambition, the desire to be respected,—men and women throw all kinds of strange meaning, heartfelt and present, imaginative, retrospective, expectant, into the vague words of the hymn. I can see one strong man shouting it with an expression as if he were pole-axing a bull. His neighbour, a frail, tearful woman, sings as if it absolves her from the tears with which she marred not only her own life. One aged woman made it clearly an expression of the nothingness of mankind, a ridicule and blasphemy of life, as if she had repeated the words of the old play:—