Strife and Peace

E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Janet Blenkinship, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
LONDON: HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1853.

Still the old tempests rage around the mountains, And ocean's billows as of old appear; The roaring wood and the resounding fountains Time has not silenced in his long career, For Nature is the same as ever. Munch. The shadow of God wanders through Nature. Linnæus.
Before yet a song of joy or of mourning had gone forth from the valleys of Norway—before yet a smoke-wreath had ascended from its huts—before an axe had felled a tree of its woods—before yet king Nor burst forth from Jotunhem to seek his lost sister, and passing through the land gave to it his name; nay, before yet there was a Norwegian, stood the high Dovre mountains with snowy summits before the face of the Creator.
Westward stretches itself out the gigantic mountain chain as far as Romsdahlshorn, whose foot is bathed by the Atlantic ocean. Southward it forms under various names (Langfjeld, Sognefjeld, Filefjeld, Hardangerfjeld, and so forth), that stupendous mountainous district which in a stretch of a hundred and fifty geographical miles comprehends all that nature possesses of magnificent, fruitful, lovely, and charming. Here stands yet, as in the first days of the world, in Upper Tellemark, the Fjellstuga, or rock-house, built by an invisible hand, and whose icy walls and towers that hand alone can overthrow: here still, as in the morning of time, meet together at Midsummer, upon the snowy foreheads of the ancient mountains, the rose-tint of morning and the rose-tint of evening for a brotherly kiss; still roar as then the mountain torrents which hurl themselves into the abyss; still reflect the ice-mirrors of the glaciers the same objects—now delighting, now awakening horror; and still to-day, even as then, are there Alpine tracts which the foot of man never ascended: valleys of wood, lonesome cells of nature, upon which only the eagle and the Midsummer-sun have looked down. Here is the old, ever young, Norway; here the eye of the beholder is astonished, but his heart expands itself; he forgets his own suffering, his own joy, forgets all that is trivial, whilst with a holy awe he has a feeling that the shadow of God wanders through nature.