They shamble in one after another, with steaming breath, for it is
winter, and loud clattering of hob-nailed boots; they beat the snow
from off them as they enter, and through the opened door I catch a
momentary glimpse of a dreary, leaden sky and snow-clad tombstones.
Somehow or other I find the strain which Handel has wedded to the
words "There the ploughman near at hand" has got into my head and
there is no getting it out again. How marvellously old Handel
understood these people!
They bob to Theobald as they pass the reading desk ("The people
hereabouts are truly respectful," whispered Christina to me; "they
know their betters"), and take their seats in a long row against the
wall. The choir clamber up into the gallery with their instruments-
a violoncello, a clarinet, and a trombone. I see them and soon I
hear them, for there is a hymn before the service, a wild strain, a
remnant, if I mistake not, of some pre-Reformation litany. I have
heard what I believe was its remote musical progenitor in the church
of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice not five years since; and again I
have heard it far away in mid-Atlantic upon a grey sea-Sabbath in
June, when neither winds nor waves are stirring, so that the emigrants
gather on deck, and their plaintive psalm goes forth upon the silver
haze of the sky, and on the wilderness of a sea that has sighed till
it can sigh no longer.
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