Minds that have been
unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this
Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because
its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because
it is linked with no memories. But even their experience may hardly
enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the effect on a simple
weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own country and people
and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be more unlike his native
town, set within sight of the widespread hill-sides, than this low,
wooded region, where he felt hidden even from the heavens by the
screening trees and hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in
the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank
tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring
in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high
dispensations. The white-washed walls; the little pews where
well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first
one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of
petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet
worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered
unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book
in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of
the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in
song: these things had been the channel of divine influences to
Marner- they were the fostering home of his religious emotions- they
were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth.
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