Thirdly, There is no road up; no omnibus to the top of Tinto; you must zigzag it in your own way, and as I have already said, most part of it alone.
Fourthly, This climbing, this exaltation, and buckling to of the mind, of itself does you good;[44] it is capital exercise, and you find out many a thing by the way. Your lungs play freely; your mouth fills with the sweet waters of keen action; the hill tries your wind and mettle, supples and hardens your joints and limbs; quickens and rejoices, while it tests your heart.
[Footnote 44: "In this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chase is certainly of service."—BURKE.]
Fifthly, You have many a fall, many a false step; you slip back, you tumble into a moss-hagg; you stumble over the baffling stones; you break your shins and lose your temper, and the finding of it makes you keep it better the next time; you get more patient, and yet more eager, and not unoften you come to a stand-still; run yourself up against, or to the edge of, some impossible precipice, some insoluble problem, and have to turn for your life; and you may find yourself over head in a treacherous wellee, whose soft inviting cushion of green has decoyed many a one before you.
Sixthly, You are for ever mistaking the top; thinking you are at it, when, behold! there it is, as if farther off than ever, and you may have to humble yourself in a hidden valley before reascending; and so on you go, at times flinging yourself down on the elastic heather, stretched panting with your face to the sky, or gazing far away athwart the widening horizon.
Seventhly, As you get up, you may see how the world below lessens and reveals itself, comes up to you as a whole, with its just proportions and relations; how small the village you live in looks, and the house in which you were born; how the plan of the place comes out; there is the quiet churchyard, and a lamb is nibbling at that infant's grave; there, close to the little church, your mother rests till the great day; and there far off you may trace the river winding through the plain, coming like human life, from darkness to darkness,—from its source in some wild, upland solitude to its eternity, the sea. But you have rested long enough, so, up and away! take the hill once again! Every effort is a victory and joy—new skill and power and relish—takes you farther from the world below, nearer the clouds and heavens; and you may note that the more you move up towards the pure blue depths of the sky—the more lucid and the more unsearchable—the farther off, the more withdrawn into their own clear infinity do they seem. Well, then, you get to the upper story, and you find it less difficult, less steep than lower down; often so plain and level that you can run off in an ecstasy to the crowning cairn, to the sacred mist—within whose cloudy shrine rests the unknown secret; some great truth of God and of your own soul; something that is not to be gotten for gold down on the plain, but may be taken here; something that no man can give or take away; something that you must work for and learn yourself, and which, once yours, is safe beyond the chances of time.
Eighthly, You enter that luminous cloud, stooping and as a little child—as, indeed, all the best kingdoms are entered—and pressing on, you come in the shadowy light to the long-dreamt-of ark,—the chest. It is shut, it is locked; but if you are the man I take you to be, you have the key, put it gently in, steadily, and home. But what is the key? It is the love of truth; neither more nor less; no other key opens it; no false one, however cunning, can pick that lock; no assault of hammer, however stout, can force it open. But with its own key a little child may open it, often does open it, it goes so sweetly, so with a will. You lift the lid; you are all alone; the cloud is round you with a sort of tender light of its own, shutting out the outer world, filling you with an eerie joy, as if alone and yet not alone. You see the cup within, and in it the one crystalline, unimaginable, inestimable drop; glowing and tremulous, as if alive. You take up the cup, you sup the drop; it enters into, and becomes of the essence of yourself; and so, in humble gratitude and love, "in sober certainty of waking bliss," you gently replace the cup. It will gather again,—it is for ever gathering; no man, woman, or child ever opened that chest, and found no drop in the cup. It might not be the very drop expected; it will serve their purpose none the worse, often much the better.
And now, bending down, you shut the lid, which you hear locking itself afresh against all but the sacred key. You leave the now hallowed mist. You look out on the old familiar world again, which somehow looks both new and old. You descend, making your observations over again, throwing the light of the present on the past; and past and present set against the boundless future. You hear coming up to you the homely sounds—the sheepdog's bark, "the cock's shrill clarion"—from the farm at the hill-foot; you hear the ring of the blacksmith's study, you see the smoke of his forge; your mother's grave has the long shadows of evening lying across it, the sunlight falling on the letters of her name, and on the number of her years; the lamb is asleep in the bield of the infant's grave. Speedily you are at your own door. You enter with wearied feet, and thankful heart; you shut the door, and you kneel down and pray to your Father in heaven, the Father of lights, your reconciled Father, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and our God and Father in and through him. And as you lie down on your own delightful bed, before you fall asleep, you think over again your ascent of the Hill Difficulty,—its baffling heights, its reaches of dreary moorland, its shifting gravel, its precipices, its quagmires, its little wells of living waters near the top, and all its "dread magnificence;" its calm, restful summit, the hush of silence there, the all-aloneness of the place and hour; its peace, its sacredness, its divineness. You see again the mist, the ark, the cup, the gleaming drop, and recalling the sight of the world below, the earth and all its fulness, you say to yourself,—
"These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty, thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sitt'st above these heavens."
And finding the burden too heavy even for these glorious lines, you take refuge in the Psalms—