Look at them on Sunday. Before the storm there is generally a brief time
of sunshine, warm and fine: after the storm, the calm that follows is a
time of dismay, speechless and tearless. Sunday was the day before the
storm: it was a day of sunshine without and within. The lovers spent the
whole day together, hand in hand. They went to church together: they sat
side by side, they warbled off the same hymn book. The service proved,
as the preacher used to say, a season of refreshment, for never doth
religion so uplift the soul as when it is entirely happy: the voices of
the choir chanting the psalms filled them with joy, and would have done
so even if they had been penitential minors, and the lamentation of a
sinner. Their hearts rose higher and higher as the preacher exhorted,
and would have flown upwards just as much whether he had brandished the
terrors of the law or held out the gracious promise of the Gospel. For
you see, at such a time as this, whatever was said or done only led this
faithful pair farther and deeper into the shady glades and fragrant
lawns and flowery dells of Love's Paradise.
Every church, at every service, and especially in the evening, contains
many such lovers. You may know them by certain infallible signs. They
sit very close together: they sing off the same book: their faces betray
by the rigidity of their attitude, which is that of pretended attention,
the far-away expression of their eyes, and the absence of any external
sign of emotion or sympathy with the preacher, that their hands, beneath
some folds of the feminine gabardine, are closely clasped. It has
sometimes pleased the philosopher and relieved the tedium of a dull
sermon to look round the congregation and to pick out the lovers--here a
pair and there a pair. Even in the church, you see, Love is conqueror
and king.
These lovers, therefore, went to church in a frame of mind truly
heavenly: nobody in the whole congregation felt more deeply pious: every
response was an Act of Praise: every prayer an Act of Gratitude: every
hymn a personal Thank-offering. But beneath those seemingly calm faces
was flying and rushing a whirlwind of hopes, memories, plans, projects,
and gratitudes. He who looks back upon the days immediately before his
wedding-day--most men no more remember their own emotions than a child
remembers yesterday's earache--will wonder how he lived through that
time of change, when all that he prayed for was granted, but on the
condition of a turning upside down of all his habits, customs, and
petted ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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