A Mountain Rivulet
This morning the day broke with a promise of sultry heat which has been
faithfully kept. The air was lifeless, the birds silent; the landscape
seemed to shrink from the ardour of a gaze that penetrated to the very
roots of the trees, and covered itself with a faint haze. All things
stood hushed and motionless in a dream of heat; even the harvest fields
were deserted. On such a day nature herself becomes voiceless; she
seems to retreat into those deep and silent chambers where the sources
of her life are hidden alike from the heat and cold, from darkness and
light. A strange and foreboding stillness is abroad in the earth, and
one hides himself from the sun as from an enemy.
In this unnatural hush there was one voice which made the silence less
ominous, and revived the spent and withered freshness of the spirit.
To hear that voice seemed to me this morning the one consolation which
the day offered. It called me with cool, delicious tones that seemed
almost audible, and I braved the deadly heat as the traveller urges his
way over the desert to the oasis that promises a draught of life. As I
passed along the broad aisle of the village street, arched by the
venerable trees of an older generation, I seemed to be in dreamland; no
sound broke the repose of midday, no footstep echoed far or near; the
cattle stood motionless in the fields beneath the sheltering branches.
I turned into the dusty country road, and saw the vision of the great
encircling hills, remote, shadowless, and dreamlike, against the white
August sky. I sauntered slowly on, pausing here and there at the foot
of some sturdy oak or wide-branched apple, until I reached the little
stream that comes rippling down from the mountain glen. A short walk
across the fields under the burning sun brought me into the shadow of
the trees that skirt the borders of the woodland. The brook loitered
between its green and sloping banks and broke in tiny billows over the
smooth stones that lay in its bed; the shadows grew denser as I
advanced, and a delicious coolness from the depths of the woods touched
the sultry atmosphere. A moment later, and I stood within the glen.
The world of human activity had vanished, shut out of sight and sound
by the deepening foliage of the trees behind me. Overhead hardly a
leaf stirred, but the branching boughs spread a marvellous roof between
the heavens and the woodland paths, and suffered only a stray flash of
light here and there to strike through. As I advanced slowly along the
well-worn path beside the brook, the glen grew more and more narrow,
the hillsides more and more precipitous. In the dusky light that
sifted down through the great trees I felt the delicious relief of low
tones after the glare of the summer day. It was another world into
which I had come; a world of unbroken repose and silence, a world of
sweet and fragrant airs cooled by the mountain rivulet and shielded by
the mountain summits and the arching umbrage.
The path vanished at last and nothing remained but the narrow channel
of the brook itself, the smooth stones making a precarious and
uncertain footing for the adventurous explorer. How soothing was the
ceaseless plash of that little stream, fretting its moss-grown banks
and dashing in miniature surge against the stones in its path! What
infinite peace reigned in this place, around which the brotherhood of
mountains had gathered, to hold it inviolate against all comers! The
great rocks were moss-covered, the steep slopes on either side were
faintly flecked with light, and one saw here and there, through the
clustered trunks of trees, a gleam of blue sky. Sometimes the brook
narrowed to a tiny stream, rushing with impetuous current between the
rocky walls that formed its channel; then it spread out shallow and
noisy over some broader expanse of white sand and polished pebble; then
it loitered in the shadow of a great rock and became a deep, silent
pool, full of shadows and the mysteries which lurk in such remote and
dusky places.
It was beside such a pool that I paused at last, and seated myself with
infinite content. Before me the glen narrowed into a rocky chasm, over
which the adventurous trees that clung to the precipitous hillsides
spread a dense roof of foliage. The dark pool at my feet was full of
mysterious shadows and seemed to cover epochs of buried history. As I
studied its motionless surface the old mediaeval legends of black,
fathomless pools came back to me, and I felt the air of enchantment
stealing over me, lulling my latter-day scepticism into sleep, and
making all mysteries rational and all marvels probable. In these
silent depths no magical art had ever submerged cities or castles; on
the stillest of all quiet afternoons no muffled echoes, faint and far,
float up through the waveless waters. But who knows what shadows have
sunk into these sunless depths; what reflections of waving branches,
what sittings of subdued light, what hushed echoes of the forgotten
summers that perished here ages ago?
In such a place, at such an hour, one feels the most subtle and the
most searching spell which Nature ever throws over those that seek her;
a spell woven of many charms, magical potions, and powerful
incantations. The quiet of the place, awful with the unbroken silence
of centuries; the soft, half light, which conceals more than it
discloses; the retreating trunks of trees interlacing their branches
against invasion from light or heat or sound; the steep ravine,
receding in darker and darker distance, until it seems like one of the
fabled passages to the under world: the wide, shadowy pool, into which
no sunlight falls, and in which night itself seems to sleep under the
very eyes of day--all these things speak a language which even the
dullest must understand. As I sit musing, conscious of the darkest
shadows and deepest mysteries close at hand, and yet undisturbed by
them, I recall that one of the noblest poems on Death ever written was
inspired in this place; and I note without surprise, as its solemn
lines come back to me, that there is no horror in it, no ignoble fear,
but awe and reverence and the sublimity of a great and hopeful thought.
The organ music of those slow-moving verses seems like the very voice
of a place out of which all dread has gone from the thought of death,
and where the brief span of life seems to arch the abyss of death with
immortality.