assault of hammer, however stout, can force it open. But with its own
key a little child may open it, often does open it, it goes so
sweetly, so with a will. You lift the lid; you are all alone; the
cloud is round you with a sort of tender light of its own, shutting
out the outer world, filling you with an _eerie_ joy, as if alone and
yet not alone. You see the cup within, and in it the one crystalline,
unimaginable, inestimable drop; glowing and tremulous, as if alive.
You take up the cup, you sup the drop; it enters into, and becomes of
the essence of yourself; and so, in humble gratitude and love, "in
sober certainty of waking bliss," you gently replace the cup. It will
gather again,--it is for ever gathering; no man, woman, or child ever
opened that chest, and found no drop in the cup. It might not be the
very drop expected; it will serve their purpose none the worse, often
much the better.

And now, bending down, you shut the lid, which you hear locking itself
afresh against all but the sacred key. You leave the now hallowed
mist. You look out on the old familiar world again, which somehow
looks both new and old. You descend, making your observations over
again, throwing the light of the present on the past; and past and
present set against the boundless future. You hear coming up to you
the homely sounds--the sheepdog's bark, "the cock's shrill
clarion"--from the farm at the hill-foot; you hear the ring of the
blacksmith's _study_, you see the smoke of his forge; your mother's
grave has the long shadows of evening lying across it, the sunlight
falling on the letters of her name, and on the number of her years;
the lamb is asleep in the bield of the infant's grave. Speedily you
are at your own door. You enter with wearied feet, and thankful heart;
you shut the door, and you kneel down and pray to your Father in
heaven, the Father of lights, your reconciled Father, the God and
Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and our God and Father in
and through him. And as you lie down on your own delightful bed,
before you fall asleep, you think over again your ascent of the Hill
Difficulty,--its baffling heights, its reaches of dreary moorland, its
shifting gravel, its precipices, its quagmires, its little wells of
living waters near the top, and all its "dread magnificence;" its
calm, restful summit, the hush of silence there, the all-aloneness of
the place and hour; its peace, its sacredness, its divineness. You s