This Mr. St. John was a man of great tranquillity of mind, and with little energy of disposition. Where he was set down there he remained, taking all that Providence sent him very dutifully, without any effort to change what might be objectionable or amend what was faulty; nobody could be more accomplished than he was in the art of "putting up with" whatsoever befell him. When once he had been established anywhere, only something from without could move him--never any impulse from within. He took what happened to him, as the birds took the crumbs he threw out to them, without question or preference. The only thing in which he ever took an initiative was in kindness. He could not bear to hurt any one's feelings, to make any one unhappy, and by dint of his submissiveness of mind he was scarcely ever unhappy himself. The poor people all loved him; he never could refuse them anything, and his reproofs were balms which broke no man's head. He was indeed, but for his sympathy, more like an object in nature--a serene, soft hillside touched by the lights and shadows of changeable skies, yet never really affected by them except for the moment--than a suffering and rejoicing human creature.
"On a fair landscape some have looked And felt, as I have heard them say, As if the fleeting time had been A thing as steadfast as the scene On which they gazed themselves away."
This was the effect Mr. St. John produced upon his friends and the parish; change seemed impossible to him--and that he could die, or disappear, or be anything different from what he was, was as hard to conceive as it was to realize that distinct geological moment when the hills were all in fusion, and there was not a tree in the forest. That this should be the case in respect to the curate in charge, whose position was on sufferance, and whom any accident happening to another old man in Italy, or any caprice of that old man's fancy, could sweep away out of the place as if he had never been, gave additional quaintness yet power to the universal impression. Nobody could imagine what Brentburn would be like without Mr. St. John, and he himself was of the same mind.
At the period when this story commences the curate was a widower with "two families." He had been so imprudent as to marry twice; he had two daughters grown up, who were coming to him, but had not arrived, and he had two little baby boys, whose mother had recently died. But how this mother and these boys came about, to Mr. St. John's great surprise--and who the daughters were who were coming to take charge of him--I must tell before I go on any further. The whole episode of his second marriage was quite accidental in the curate's life.