“I will go on with you to the bridge, Mr. Chillingly,” said the vicar, when the ladies had disappeared within their garden. “We had little time to look over my books, and, by the by, I hope you at least took the Juvenal.”
“No, Mr. Emlyn; who can quit your house with an inclination for satire? I must come some morning and select a volume from those works which give pleasant views of life and bequeath favourable impressions of mankind. Your wife, with whom I have had an interesting conversation, upon the principles of aesthetical philosophy—”
“My wife! Charlotte! She knows nothing about aesthetical philosophy.”
“She calls it by another name, but she understands it well enough to illustrate the principles by example. She tells me that labour and duty are so taken up by you—
‘In den heitern Regionen
Wo die reinen Formen wohnen,’
that they become joy and beauty,—is it so?”
“I am sure that Charlotte never said anything half so poetical. But, in plain words, the days pass with me very happily. I should be ungrateful if I were not happy. Heaven has bestowed on me so many sources of love,—wife, children, books, and the calling which, when one quits one’s own threshold, carries love along with it into the world beyond; a small world in itself,—only a parish,—but then my calling links it with infinity.”
“I see; it is from the sources of love that you draw the supplies for happiness.”
“Surely; without love one may be good, but one could scarcely be happy. No one can dream of a heaven except as the abode of love. What writer is it who says, ‘How well the human heart was understood by him who first called God by the name of Father’?”
“I do not remember, but it is beautifully said. You evidently do not subscribe to the arguments in Decimus Roach’s ‘Approach to the Angels.’”