ttle way over
sank its other wall, steep as a plumb-line could have made it, of solid
rock. On his right lay green fields of clover and strange grasses. Ever
and anon from the cleft steamed up great blinding clouds of mist, which
now wandered about over the nations of rocks on the mountain side beyond
the gulf, now wrapt himself in their bewildering folds. In one moment
the whole creation had vanished, and there seemed scarce existence
enough left for more than the following footstep; the next, a mighty
mountain stood in front, crowned with blinding snow, an awful fact; the
lovely heavens were over his head, and the green sod under his feet; the
grasshoppers chirped about him, and the gorgeous butterflies flew. From
regions far beyond came the bells of the kine and the goats. He reached
a little inn, and there took up his quarters.

I am able to be a little minute in my description, because I have since
visited the place myself. Great heights rise around it on all sides. It
stands as between heaven and hell, suspended between peaks and gulfs.
The wind must roar awfully there in the winter; but the mountains stand
away with their avalanches, and all the summer long keep the cold off
the grassy fields.

The same evening, he was already weary. The next morning it rained. It
rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the morrow. In the
evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The sun was setting. The
snow-peaks were faintly tinged with rose, and the ragged masses of
vapour that hung lazy and leaden-coloured about the sides of the abyss,
were partially dyed a sulky orange red. Then all faded into gray. But
as the sunlight vanished, a veil sank from the face of the moon, already
half-way to the zenith, and she gathered courage and shone, till the
mountain looked lovely as a ghost in the gleam of its snow and the
glimmer of its glaciers. 'Ah!' thought Falconer, 'such a peace at last
is all a man can look for--the repose of a spectral Elysium, a world
where passion has died away, and only the dim ghost of its memory to
disturb with a shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming
years. The religion that can do but this much is not a very great or
very divine thing. The human heart cannot invent a better it may be, but
it can imagine grander results.

He did not yet know what the religion was of which he spoke. As well
might a man born stone-deaf estimate the power of sweet sounds, or
he who knows not a