if they had remembered
suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.
Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
together in the sunshine towards the brows of ravines, where the pines
take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
roar, in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down, pale from
the glaciers, filling all the chasms with enchanted cold, beating
themselves to pieces against the great rocks that they have themselves
cast down, and forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise. The
mountain paths stoop to those glens in forky zigzags, leading to some
grey and narrow arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve with the
ferns that fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to
its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far up
the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the sky is seen through the
openings in the pines thin with excess of light; and, in its clear
consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are
gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange
faint silence of possession by the sunshine, which has in it so deep a
melancholy, full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the
walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds,
like the veil of some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam
flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all strength,
lifted above all sorrows, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the
air by that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two
golden clouds.

High above all sorrow? Yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The traveller
on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf, and
strikes the pebbles gaily over the edge of the mountain road, sees
with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that
nestle along those sloping orchards, and glow beneath the boughs of
the pines. Here, it may well seem to him, if there be sometimes
hardship, there must be at least innocence and peace, and fellowship
of the human soul with nature. It is not so. The wild goats that leap
along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of
God as the men that toil among them,--perhaps more. Enter the street
of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy
foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here,
it is torpor--not abso