Recrossing The Bridge I Stood A Little
Time And Looked Once More At The Noble Church Tower Standing
Dark Against The Clear Amber-Coloured Sky, And Said To Myself:
"Why, This Is One Of The Oddest Incidents Of My Life!
Not
that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful - just a
small rustic village, one of a thousand
In the land; a big new
church in which some person was playing rather madly on the
organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass
west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar."
It was not in these things; it was a sense of something
strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other
places and people and experiences. The sensation was like
that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's
romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the
hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips
back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand
years ago. It is the same familiar green land in which he
finds himself - the same old country and the same sort of
people with feelings and habits of life and thought
unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs
of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference.
I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been
conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently
did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out
of place in or on a sacred building.
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