How easy is it here to forget the world! Neither books, nor news, nor science; no one travels and no one thinks. This valley is the whole universe; from time to time a peasant passes, or a man-at-arms. A moment more and he is gone; the mind has retained no more trace of him than the empty road. Every morning the eyes find again the great woods asleep upon the mountain’s brow, and the layers of clouds stretched out on the edge of the sky. The rocks light up, the summit of the forests trembles beneath the rising breeze, the shadow changes at the foot of the oaks, and the mind takes on the calm and the monotony of these slow sights by which it is nourished. Meanwhile the responses of the monks drone confusedly in the chapel; then their measured tread resounds in the high corridors. Each day the same hours bring back the same impressions and the same images. The soul empties itself of worldly ideas, and the heavenly dream, which begins to flow within, little by little heaps up the silent wave that is going to fill it.
Far from it are science and treatises on doctrine. They drain the stream instead of swelling it. Will so many words augment peace and inward tenderness? “The kingdom of God consisteth not in word, but in power.” The heart must be moved, tears must flow, the arms must open toward an unseen place, and the sudden trouble will not be the work of the lips, but the touch of the hand divine. This hand it is which doth “lift up the humble mind;” this it is which teaches “without noise of words, without confusion of opinions, without ambition of honor, without the scuffling of arguments.” A light penetrates, and all at once the eyes see as it were a new heaven and a new earth.
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The men of the age perceive in its events only the events themselves; the solitary discovers behind the veil of things created the presence and the will of God. He it is who by the sun warms the earth, and by the rain refreshes it. He it is who sustains the mountains and envelops them at the setting of the sun in the repose of night. The heart feels everywhere, around and inside of things, an immense goodness, like a vague ocean of light which penetrates and animates the world; to this goodness it intrusts and abandons itself, like a child that drops asleep at evening on its mother’s knees. A hundred times a day divine things become palpable to it. The light streams through the morning mist, chaste as the brow of the virgin; the stars shine like celestial eyes, and yonder when the sun goes down the clouds kneel at the brink of heaven, like a blazing choir of seraphim.