THE HAPPY LIFE OF A PARISH PRIEST IN

I

SWEDEN.

BY JEAN PAUL.

WILL begin with winter, and I will suppose it to be Christmas. The priest, whom we shall imagine to be a German, and summoned from the southern climate of Germany upon presentation to the church of a Swedish hamlet lying in a high polar latitude, rises in cheerfulness about seven o'clock in the morning; and till half past nine he burns his lamp. At nine o'clock the stars are still shining, and the unclouded moon even yet longer. This prolongation of starlight into the forenoon is to him delightful; for he is a German, and has a sense of something marvellous in a starry forenoon. Methinks I behold the priest and his flock moving towards the church with lanterns: the lights dispersed amongst the crowd connect the congregation into the appearance of some domestic group or larger household, and carry the priest back to his childish years during the winter season and Christmas matins, when every hand bore its candle. Arrived at the pulpit, he declares to his audience the plain truth, word for word, as it stands in the Gospel in the presence of God, all intellectual pretensions are called upon to be silent; the very reason ceases to be reasonable; nor is anything reasonable in the sight of God but a sincere and upright heart.

Just as he and his flock are issuing from the church, the

bright Christmas sun ascends above the horizon, and shoots his beams upon their faces. The old men, who are numerous in Sweden, are all tinged with the colors of youth by the rosy morning-lustre; and the priest, as he looks away from them to mother earth lying in the sleep of winter, and to the churchyard, where the flowers and the men are all in their graves together, might secretly exclaim with the poet: "Upon the dead mother, in peace and utter gloom, are reposing the dead children. After a time, uprises the everlasting sun; and the mother starts up at the summons of the heavenly dawn with a resurrection of her ancient Yes: but they must wait

gloom: awhile."

And her children?

At home he is awaited by a warm study, and a "longlevelled rule" of sunlight upon the book-clad wall.

The afternoon he spends delightfully; for, having before him such a perfect flower-stand of pleasures, he scarcely knows where he should settle. Supposing it to be Christmas day, he preaches again: he preaches on a subject which calls up images of the beauteous Eastern land, or of eternity. By this time, twilight and gloom prevail through the church only a couple of wax lights upon the altar throw wondrous and mighty shadows through the aisles: the angel that hangs down from the roof above the baptismal font is awoke into a solemn life by the shadows and the rays, and seems almost in the act of ascension: through the windows, the stars or the moon are beginning to peer: aloft, in the pulpit, which is now hid in gloom, the priest is inflamed and possessed by the sacred burden of glad tidings which he is announcing: he is lost and insensible to all besides; and from amidst the darkness which surrounds him he pours down his thunders, with tears and agitation, reasoning of future worlds, and of the heaven of heavens, and whatsoever else can most powerfully shake the heart and the affections.

Descending from his pulpit in these holy fervors, he now, perhaps, takes a walk: it is about four o'clock: and he walks beneath a sky lit up by the shifting northern lights, that to his eye appear but an Aurora striking upwards from the eternal morning of the south, or as a forest composed of saintly thickets, like the fiery bushes of Moses, that are round the throne of God.

Thus, if it be the afternoon of Christmas day: but if it be any other afternoon, visitors, perhaps, come and bring their well-bred grown-up daughters; like the fashionable world in London, he dines at sunset; that is to say, like the un-fashionable world of London, he dines at two o'clock; and he drinks coffee by moonlight; and the parsonage-house becomes an enchanted palace of pleasure, gleaming with twilight, starlight, and moonlight. Or, perhaps, he goes over to the schoolmaster, who is teaching his afternoon school there, by the candlelight, he gathers, round his knees all the scholars, as if being the children of his spiritual children they must therefore be his own grandchildren; and with delightful words he wins their attention, and pours knowledge into their docile hearts.

All these pleasures failing, he may pace up and down in his library, already, by three o'clock, gloomy with twilight, but fitfully enlivened by a glowing fire, and steadily by the bright moonlight; and he needs do no more than taste at every turn of his walk a little orange marmalade, to call up images of beautiful Italy, and its gardens and orange groves, before all his five senses, and, as it were, to the very tip of his tongue. Looking at the moon, he will not fail to recollect that the very same silver disk hangs at the very same moment between the branches of the laurels in Italy. It will delight him to consider that the Eolian harp and the lark, and indeed music of all kinds, and the stars and children, are just the same in hot climates and in cold. And when the post-boy, that rides in with news from Italy,

weary and helpless, on one side a wide way of lurid water, on the other half a mile of moving desolation.

Far to go, and no time to waste!

"Give way, Bill!

"Ay, ay!"

Give way!"

Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the whisper of the ice around them.

By this time hundreds from the Foundry and the village were swarming upon the wharf and the steamboat.

"A hundred tar-barrels would n't git up my steam in time to do any good," says Cap'n Ambuster. "If them two in my skiff don't overhaul the man, he's gone."

"You're sure it's a man?" says Smith Wheelwright. "Take a squint through my glass. I'm dreffully afeard it's a gal; but suthin' 's got into my eye, so I can't see." Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye, -suthin' saline and acrid, — namely, a tear.

"It's a woman," says Wheelwright, same kind blinded him also.

and suthin' of the

Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly filled with perplexing snow-dust from a heavy squall. A white curtain dropped between the anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.

The same white curtain hid the dark floating object from its pursuers. There was nothing in sight to steer by now. Wade steered by his last glimpse, by the current, by the rush of the roaring wind, - by instinct.

How merciful that in such a moment a man is spared the agony of thought! His agony goes into action, intense as life.

It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down without that. They could not stop to bail, and the miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly over the gunwale. Which would come to the point of foundering first, the boat or the little floe it aimed for?