[THE MOUNTAINS.]
DID you ever go East over the Pennsylvania Central Railroad? If not, do it at your first opportunity, and get a glimpse at the mountain scenery. It will reconcile you to life. The memory of those grand, imposing forms, towering into the heavens, clothed with their mighty greenery, girdled with the mists and crowned with the eternal sunshine, will stand you in good stead when life presses with its cares and anxieties, and the daily routine frets and worries, and friendship grows forgetful, and the grasshopper begins to be a burden.
I remember that the first thought which flashed upon me, as I stood upon the rear of the train, crawling up the hills in sinuous track, like some great serpent, was not so much the physical aspects as the perfect repose which seemed to brood among them. There was no life apparent—no motion visible. There was a river, which now and then glistened in the sunlight, but it was far down in the valleys, and it seemed from our height only a silver thread, tying the mountains together in a great emerald cluster. You saw the tops of the trees overlaying each other, and covering the mountains like the scales of a fish. But there was no motion in them. They were solid, massive and gigantic as petrified Titans. I do not believe the birds sing on those mountain sides; I do not believe the fairies gambol there in the moonlight, nor even that the insects play their part in the breezy morning symphonies under those still trees. It seems to me that none but a Deity should come down to those mountain tops, and thrice happy the man who can commune with him in that solitude. It seems to me that there would be no need of the written word there. The genius of solitude broods there—on the jutting peaks, in the great trees, in the solemn shadows, in the dark, silent pools and tarns, in the dank, trailing robes of the mist, and in the ineffable golden glory of the sunshine. I can now see how Irma found repose on "the Heights;" how she could reach from the Alpine summits up toward Heaven, and feel the hand of the Great Father reaching down to her; how, among the toils, and the sorrows, and the sins of the little world down in the valleys, the sweet repose of the mountains purified her; and how she struggled out of vice into virtue, out of impurity into perfect purity. I can see how all great souls, tormented with the follies and littleness of the world, with the ungratefulness and faithlessness of those they have trusted, bound down under the weight of their earthly burdens, their wings clipped, and their hands fettered, have longed for the mountain tops, where they might forever forget the world, and be alone with nature and the Deity. I can see how God came down to Moses on the mountain; how the marvelous transfiguration shone from the mountain; how Goethe sang,
"On every height there lies repose."
Another thought struck me, and that was the magnificent littleness of humanity, when it is brought into the presence of these mighty manifestations of Nature. What a poor little speck you are upon the great canvas! How small you look with your aches and pains, your fusses and foibles, your fashions and furbelows, your vanities and ambitions, in this eternal presence! How evanescent is fame; how transient is wealth; how feeble is love; how fickle is friendship; how small is this hand-breadth of life; how utterly insignificant all accomplishment of human industry; how utterly pinchbeck all displays of human grandeur, compared with this awful majesty of Nature! How few men have caught the mountain spirit and left it in their works! Blot out Shakspeare and Milton and Dante, Moses and Paul and Martin Luther, Raphael and Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Bach, and who is left to correspond with the height and depth, the majesty and solitude of the mountains? Not that genius was confined to them, but the other great names have been celebrated in the valleys, by the brooks, and among the flowers. They made the earth lovelier and brighter for their presence, but they did not reach the heights of human nature, where dwells everlasting repose. They saw the star-shadows on the water, but these others soared to them in the heavens. They sowed the world with richest flowers of thought. To these others, it was given to pluck the asphodels and amaranths growing by eternal waters. They budded in the trees of the valleys, and their songs were sweet. These others sought the regions above the storms with their eagle-flights, and when their voices come to us from their calm heights, they are laden with an awful majesty and beauty, as the west is now laden with the thunder-clouds, and pregnant with sweeping power, as those clouds are now pregnant with the lightnings.