These Dark Channelled Rocks, Worn, As With Eternal Tears, - These
Traces, So Evident Of Ancient And Vast Desolations, - Suggest The Idea
Of Boundless Power And Inexorable Will, Before Whose Course The Most
Vehement Of Human Feelings Are As The Fine Spray Of The Cataract.
"For, surely, the mountain, falling, cometh to nought;
The rock is remored out of his place;
The waters wear
The stones;
Thou washest away the things that grow out of the earth,
And thou destroyest the hopes of man;
Thou prevailest against him, and he passeth;
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away."
The sceptical inquirer into the mysteries of eternal things might
here, if ever, feel the solemn irony of Eliphaz the Temanite: -
"Should a wise man utter vain knowledge?
Should he reason with unprofitable talk?
Or with speeches that can do no good?
Art thou the first man that ever was born?
Or wast thou made before the hills?"
There are some of my fellow-travellers, by the by, who, if they
_had_ been made before the hills, would never have been much
wiser. All through these solemn passages and gorges, they are
discussing hotels, champagne, wine, and cigars. I presume they would
do the same thing at the gates of the Celestial City, if they should
accidentally find themselves there. It is one of the dark providences
that multitudes of this calibre of mind find leisure and means to come
among these scenes, while many to whom they would be an inspiration,
in whose souls they would unseal ceaseless fountains of beauty, are
forever excluded by poverty and care.
At noon we stopped at Sallenches, famous for two things; first, as the
spot where people get dinner, and second, where they take the
_char_, a carriage used when the road is too steep for the
diligence. Here S., who had been feeling ill all the morning, became
too unwell to proceed, so that we had to lie by an hour or two, and
did not go on with the caravan. I sat down at the room window to study
and sketch a mountain that rose exactly opposite. I thought to myself,
"Now, would it be possible to give to one that had not seen it an idea
of how this looks?" Let me try if words can paint it. Right above the
fiat roof of the houses on the opposite side of the street rose this
immense mountain wall. The lower tier seemed to be a turbulent swell
of pasture land, rolling into every imaginable shape; green billows
and dells, rising higher and higher in the air as you looked upward,
dyed here and there in bright yellow streaks, by the wild crocus, and
spotted over with cattle. Dark clumps and belts of pine now and then
rise up among them; and scattered here and there in the heights, among
green hollows, were cottages, that looked about as big as hickory
nuts.
Above all this region was still another, of black pines and crags; the
pines going up, and up, and up, till they looked no larger than pin
feathers; and surmounting all, straight, castellated turrets of rock,
looking out of swathing bands of cloud.
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