y surveyed the
people. After a few moments the music stopped. There was perfect silence
in the crowded church. Then, moving like a shadow to the desk, the
preacher, in a voice that was in singular harmony with the expression
of his face, began to read a hymn. His voice had a remarkable cadence,
rising and falling with yearning tenderness and sober pathos. It seemed
to impart every feeling, every thought, every aspiration of the hymn.
It was full of reverence, gratitude, longing, and resignation:

"While Thee I seek, protecting Power,
Be my vain wishes stilled;
And may this consecrated hour
With better hopes be filled."

When he had read it and sat down again, Hope Wayne felt as if a religious
service had already been performed.

The simplicity, and fervor, and long-drawn melody with which he had read
the hymn apparently inspired the choir with sympathy, and after a few
notes from the organ they began to sing an old familiar tune. It was
taken up by the congregation until the church trembled with the sound,
and the saunterers in the street outside involuntarily ceased laughing
and talking, and, touched by some indefinable association, raised their
hats and stood bareheaded in the sunlight, while the solemn music filled
the air.

The hymn was sung, the prayer was offered, the chapter was read; then,
after a little silence, that calm, refined, anxious, pale, yearning face
appeared again at the desk. The preacher balanced himself for a few
moments alternately upon each foot--moved his tongue, as if tasting the
words he was about to utter--and announced his text: "Peace I leave with
you: my peace I give unto you."

He began in the same calm, simple way. A natural, manly candor certified
the truth of every word he spoke. The voice--at first high in tone, and
swinging, as it were, in long, wave-like inflections--grew gradually
deeper, and more equally sustained. There was very little movement of
the hands or arms; only now and then the finger was raised, or the hand
gently spread and waved. As he warmed in his discourse a kind of
celestial grace glimmered about his person, and his pale, thoughtful face
kindled and beamed with holy light. His sentences were entirely simple.
There was no rhetoric, no declamation or display. Yet the soul of the
hearer seemed to be fused in a spiritual eloquence which, like a white
flame, burned all the personality of the speaker away. The people sat
as if they were listening to a disem