The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.]Le Gallienne, Richard
General
The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.]
Le Gallienne, Richard
Clergy -- England -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction
And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real
monument to Jenny. London--no longer the city of Isabel--must learn to
say "Theophilus Londonderry" so naturally, that it would some day serve
as an unforgettable remembrance of Jenny. He must become a great man,
because a great name is the one shrine in which love's memory may escape
oblivion. In the arms of his name Jenny would then be carried down the
years, one woman-star saved from the night of death. Again, the world,
for which in one way he had so little care, was to help him indirectly
to keep his troth to Jenny.
In a sense, the mountain was already coming to this young prophet; for
with the winter some of London's finest spirits were now and again to be
met in that incongruous Zion Place, as visiting lecturers to New Zion.
And each one, as he came, was impressed as Isabel had been on that old
evening when she had discovered her colony of surprise-people. Each
realised in that gravely masterful young minister a power and a force of
attraction which could not long remain hidden in that little country
town. Meanwhile, their visits enabled him to test his own calibre by
comparison with theirs, and to realise that his instincts had not
befooled him, but that he too had been called to the stage of the
great world.
It was in the operation of this method of inviting the mountain that the
French poet, with a reference to whom we began this history, made his
fantastic appearance in Zion Place. It is to be feared that it was a
conscious love of paradox that prompted an invitation from which indeed
New Zion must derive the most mystical of benefits and the most
imaginary of delights; but it was Theophil's whim to crown the
Renaissance in Coalchester by this _reductio ad absurdum._ The
subtlest poetic art of France should come in person to Coalchester, and
after days should tell that Theophilus Londonderry, while still a young
country minister, had bidden Paris sing her loveliest siren-song in the
musty little lecture-hall of New Zion. It is thus power bends the bow of
the world till the ends meet, and shoots the arrow of his name among
the stars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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