Sublime

This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, electio

Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its

He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

It is the old things that startle and intoxicate.

But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced, with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions, the way of a man who wished to walk nameless and alone.

we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.