I read this yesterday evening and its pearlescent beauty struck me. If I could write like this I would never leave the house, except to go to the public library to read my own books. That's not true of course but you get my drift.
Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval, good-humouredly about his official religion: about an Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with probably, a little cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire of a Saturday afternoon; if you looked down on the whole broad county you would not see a ingle village green without its whie flannels. That was why Yorkshire alwayd leads the averages ... Probably by the time you got to heaven you would be so worn out by the work on this planet that you would accept the English Sunday, for ever, with extreme relief! (Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades)
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