experience, who had never thought specially of the matter, but
had blunderingly applied themselves to whatever form of art
confronted them at the moment of their making a move, were by
this time acquiring renown as new lights; while he was still
unknown. He wished that some accident could have hemmed in
his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in a
channel ever so worn.

Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own
future, he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the
notes of a familiar hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a
valley below. He listened more heedfully. It was his old
friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had never once heard since
the lisping days of childhood, and whose existence, much as it
had then been to him, he had till this moment quite forgotten.
Where the 'New Sabbath' had kept itself all these years--why
that sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the
cathedrals, parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that
he had been acquainted with during his apprenticeship to life,
and until his ways had become irregular and uncongregational--
he could not, at first, say. But then he recollected that the
tune appertained to the old west-gallery period of church-
music, anterior to the great choral reformation and the rule
of Monk--that old time when the repetition of a word, or half-
line of a verse, was not considered a disgrace to an
ecclesiastical choir.

Willing to be interested in anything which would keep him out-
of-doors, Somerset dismounted from the stile and descended the
hill before him, to learn whence the singing proceeded.