To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
greeting - and whatever else can be had for nothing.
If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
all - when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
Christian by force of rhetoric - what should I note (after so many
years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and
new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that
such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the
work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this
shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered,
and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as
the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had
been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
Enter page number
Next
Page 1 of 361
Words from 1 to 254
of 97758
