er higher and higher
still. Not until he actually stood upon the peak did he know that
there was the earthly hitherto--the final obstacle of unobstancy,
the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was to human foot
impervious. The sun was about two hours towards the west, when
Gibbie, his little legs almost as active as ever, surmounted the
final slope. Running up like a child that would scale heaven he
stood on the bare round, the head of the mountain, and saw, with an
invading shock of amazement, and at first of disappointment, that
there was no going higher: in every direction the slope was
downward. He had never been on the top of anything before. He had
always been in the hollows of things. Now the whole world lay
beneath him. It was cold; in some of the shadows lay snow--weary
exile from both the sky and the sea and the ways of them--captive in
the fetters of the cold--prisoner to the mountain top; but Gibbie
felt no cold. In a glow with the climb, which at the last had been
hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul with the
feeling that he was above everything that was, uplifted on the very
crown of the earth, he stood in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow,
the conqueror of height, the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of
space. Nobody knew of such marvel but him! Gibbie had never even
heard the word poetry, but none the less was he the very stuff out
of which poems grow, and now all the latent poetry in him was set a
swaying and heaving--an ocean inarticulate because unobstructed--a
might that could make no music, no thunder of waves, because it had
no shore, no rocks of thought against which to break in speech. He
sat down on the topmost point; and slowly, in the silence and the
loneliness, from the unknown fountains of the eternal consciousness,
the heart of the child filled. Above him towered infinitude,
immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his eye in a soaring
dome of blue--the one visible symbol informed and insouled of the
eternal, to reveal itself thereby. In it, centre and life, lorded
the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south and east from
the endless heaps of the world, that lifted themselves in all
directions. Down their sides ran the streams, down busily, hasting
away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back to the
ocean-heart--through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks and
willowy marsh. Behind the valleys rose mounta