from the
glaciers, filling all their 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 these 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 sorrow, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the air by
that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two golden
clouds.

Sec. 4. 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 gayly over the edge of the mountain road, sees
with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that nestle
among 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
absolute 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