This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which
a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was
all of outward show the small edifice could boast. Within there was very
little that pretended to be attractive. A small organ at one side, and a
plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church
reduced to its simplest expression:
Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in
all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy
of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its
Sunday garniture. For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the
fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every
Sunday morning over the preacher's desk. Slight, thin-tissued blossoms
of pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the full-breasted
and deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and
yellow flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew
under skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without
knowing that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year told
its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple desk.
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