Thomas Wingfold. Volume II by George MacDonald

The curate walked hurriedly home, and seated himself at his table, / where yet lay his Greek Testament open at the passage he had been / pondering for his sermon. Alas! all he had then been thinking with / such fervour had vanished. He knew his inspiring text, but the rest / was gone. Worst of all, feeling was gone with thought, and was, for / the time at least, beyond recall. Righteous as his anger was, it had / ruffled the mirror of his soul till it could no longer reflect / heavenly things. He rose, caught up his New Testament, and went to / the church-yard. It was a still place, and since the pains of a new / birth had come upon him, he had often sought the shelter of its / calm. A few yards from the wall of the rectory garden stood an old / yew-tree, and a little nearer on one side was a small thicket of / cypress; between these and the wall was an ancient stone upon which / he generally seated himself. It had already begun to be called the / curate's chair. Most imagined him drawn thither by a clerical love / of gloom, but in that case he could scarcely have had such delight / in seeing the sky through the dark foliage of the yew: he thought / the parts so seen looked more divinely blue than any of the rest. He / would have admitted, however, that he found quiet, for the soul as / well as the body, upon this edge of the world, this brink of the / gulf that swallowed the ever-pouring ever-vanishing Niagara of human / life. On the stone he now seated himself and fell a-musing.

What a change had come upon him -- slow, indeed, yet how vast, since / the night when he sat in the same churchyard indignant and uneasy / with the words of Bascombe like hot coals in his heart! He had been / made ashamed of himself who had never thought much of himself, but / the more he had lost of worthiness in his own eyes the more he had / gained in worth. And the more his poor satisfaction with himself had / died out, the more the world had awaked around him. For it must be / remembered that a little conceit is no more to be endured than a / great one, but must be swept utterly away. Sky and wind and water / and birds and trees said to him, "Forget thyself and we will think / of thee. Sing no more to thyself thy foolish songs of decay, and we / will all sing to thee of love and hope and faith and resurrection. " / Earth and air had grown full of hints and sparkles and vital / motions, as if between them and his soul an abiding community of / fundamental existence had manifested itself. He had never in the old / days that were so near and yet seemed so far behind him, consciously / cared for the sunlight: now even the shadows were marvellous in his / eyes, and the glitter the golden weather-cock on the tower was like / a cry of the prophet Isaiah. High and alone in the clear blue air it / swung, an endless warning to him that veers with the wind of the / world, the words of men, the summer breezes of their praise, or the / bitter blasts of their wintry blame; it was no longer to him a cock / of the winds, but a cock of the truth -- a Peter-cock, that crew aloud / in golden shine its rebuke of cowardice and lying. Never before had / he sought acquaintance with the flowers that came dreaming up out of / the earth in the woods and the lanes like a mist of loveliness, but / the spring-time came in his own soul, and then he knew the children / of the spring.