lute suffering--not starvation or disease; but
darkness of calm enduring: the spring, known only as the time of the
scythe, and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as
a warmth, the wind as a chill, and the mountains as a danger. They do
not understand so much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They
understand dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality,
faith--these things they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so
happier; to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank
unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk; to
see at the foot of their low death-beds a pale figure upon a cross,
dying, also patiently;--in this they are different from the cattle and
from the stones; but, in all this, unrewarded, as far as concerns the
present life. For them, there is neither hope nor passion of spirit;
for them, neither advance nor exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark
night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset; and life ebbs away. No
books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest,--except only sometimes a
little sitting in the sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls
thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of a few prayers, not
understood, by the altar-rails of the dimly gilded chapel,--and so,
back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken--that
cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and ruinous
stones, and unlightened even in their religion, except by the vague
promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening, and
obscured by an unspeakable horror--a smoke, as it were, of martyrdom,
coiling up with the incense; and amidst the images of tortured bodies
and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very cross, for them,
dashed more deeply than for others with gouts of blood.

87. A Highland scene is beyond doubt pleasant enough in its own way;
but, looked close at, has its shadows.[34] Here, for instance, is the
very fact of one--as pretty as I can remember,--having seen many. It
is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by
jutting rocks, and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it
to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, drooping into
quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then,
first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes
away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain ash and
alder. The autumn sun, low, but cle