[8] ‘Legends of Old Testament Characters,’ i. p. 83.
[9] Œdip., 1. II. ii. See ‘Mankind: their Origin and Destiny,’ p. 699.
[11] Soc. of Heb. Literature’s Publications. 2d Series. ‘Legends from the Midrash,’ by Thomas Chenery (Trübner & Co.). The same legend is referred to in the story of the Astrologer in Washington Irving’s ‘Alhambra.’
Chapter VIII.
Obstacles.
Mephistopheles on Crags—Emerson on Monadnoc—Ruskin on Alpine peasants—Holy and Unholy Mountains—The Devil’s Pulpit—Montagnards—Tarns—Tenjo—T’ai-shan—Apocatequil—Tyrolese Legends—Rock Ordeal—Scylla and Charybdis—Scottish Giants—Pontifex—Devil’s Bridges—Le géant Yéous.
Related to the demons of Barrenness, and to the hostile human demons, but still possessing characteristics of their own, are the demons supposed to haunt gorges, mountain ranges, ridges of rocks, streams which cannot be forded and are yet unbridged, rocks that wreck the raft or boat. Each and every obstruction that stood in the way of man’s plough, or of his first frail ship, or his migration, has been assigned its demon. The reader of Goethe’s page has only to turn to the opening lines of Walpurgisnacht in Faust to behold the real pandemonium of the Northern man, as in Milton he may find that of the dweller amid fiery deserts and volcanoes. That labyrinth of vales, crossed with wild crag and furious torrent, is the natural scenery to surround the orgies of the phantoms which flit from the uncultured brain to uncultured nature. Elsewhere in Goethe’s great poem, Mephistopheles pits against the philosophers the popular theory of the rugged remnants of chaos in nature, and the obstacles before which man is powerless.
Faust. For me this mountain mass rests nobly dumb;