commonplace person, and not at all sentimentally inclined, I have
a great liking for a churchyard. Hardly a day passes on which I do
not go and walk up and down for a little in that which surrounds
my church. Probably some people may regard me as extremely devoid
of occupation, when I confess that daily, after breakfast, and
before sitting down to my work (which is pretty hard, though they
may not think so), I walk slowly down to the churchyard, which
is a couple of hundred yards off, and there pace about for a few
minutes, looking at the old graves and the mossy stones. Nor is
this only in summer-time, when the sward is white with daisies,
when the ancient oaks around the gray wall are leafy and green,
when the passing river flashes bright through their openings and
runs chiming over the warm stones, and when the beautiful hills
that surround the quiet spot at a little distance are flecked with
summer light and shade; but in winter too, when the bare branches
look sharp against the frosty sky, and the graves look like wavelets
on a sea of snow. Now, if I were anxious to pass myself off upon
my readers as a great and thoughtful man, I might here give an
account of the profound thoughts which I think in my daily musings
in my pretty churchyard. But, being an essentially commonplace
person (as I have no doubt about nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of every thousand of my readers also are), I must here confess
that generally I walk about the churchyard, thinking and feeling
nothing very particular. I do not believe that ordinary people,
when worried by some little care, or pressed down by some little
sorrow, have only to go and muse in a churchyard in order to feel
how trivial and transient such cares and sorrows are, and how very
little they ought to vex us. To commonplace mortals, it is the
sunshine within the breast that does most to brighten; and the thing
that has most power to darken is the shadow there. And the scenes