the village behind me. The road
skirted the base of the mountain, and struck at once into the heart of
the wilderness, which the clustering peaks have preserved from any but
the most fleeting associations with the peopled world around. A
barrier of ancient silence and solitude soon separated me even in
thought from the familiar scenes I had left. A virginal beauty rested
upon the road, and sank deep into my own heart as I passed along; to be
silent and open-minded was enough to bring one into fellowship with the
hour and the scene. The clear, bracing air, the rustling of leaves
slowly sifting down through the lower branches, the solemn quietude,
filled the morning with a deep joy that touched the very sources of
life, and made them sweet in every thought and emotion. It was like a
new beginning in the old, old story of time; the stains of ancient
wrong, the blights of sorrow, the wrecks of hope, were gone; sweet with
the untrodden freshness of a new day lay the earth, and looked up to
the heavens with a gaze as pure and calm as their own. Somehow all
life seemed sublimated in that golden sunshine; the grosser elements
had vanished, the material had become the transparent medium of the
spiritual, the discords had blended into harmony, and one would have
heard without surprise the faint, far song of the stars. The whole
world was one vast articulate poem, and human life added its own strain
of penetrating sweetness. At last, after all these years of struggle
and failure, one was really living!

The road, slowly ascending the long wooded slope, wound its way through
the forest until it brought me to the mountain path which climbs, with
many a halt and pause, to the very summit. Dense foliage overshadows
it, a little thinner now that the hand of autumn has begun to disrobe
the trees. Great rocks often lie in the course of the path and send it
in a narrow curve around them. Sometimes one comes upon a bold ascent
up the face of a projecting cliff; sometimes one plunges into the very
heart of the shadows as they gather over the rocky channel of the brook
that later will run foaming down to the valley. Step by step one
widens his horizon, although it is only at intervals that he is able to
note his progress upward. At the base of the mountain one saw only a
circle of hills, and the long sweep of wooded slopes which converge in
the valley; gradually the horizon widens as one climbs beyond the
summit lines of the lo