On the Heights
Nature creates days for special insights and outlooks--days whose
distinctive qualities make them part of the universal revelation of the
year. There are days for the deep woods, and for the open fields; days
for the beach, and for the inland river; days for solitary musing
beside some secluded rivulet, and days for the companionship and
movement of the highways. Each day is fitted by some subtle magic of
adaptation to the place and the aspect of nature which it is to reveal
with a clearness denied to other hours. There came such a day not long
ago to me; a day of tonic atmosphere--clear, cloudless, inspiring;
there was no audible invitation in the air, but I knew by some instinct
that the day and the mountains were parts of one complete whole. The
morning itself was a new birth of nature, full of promise and prophecy;
one of those hours in which only the greatest and noblest things are
credible, in which one rejects unfaith and doubt and all lesser and
meaner things as dreams of a night from which there has come an eternal
awakening; a day such as Emerson had in thought when he wrote: "The
scholar must look long for the right hour for Plato's Timaeus. At last
the elect morning arrives, the early dawn--a few lights conspicuous in
the heaven, as of a world just created and still becoming--and in its
wide leisure we dare open that book. There are days when the great are
near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even;
when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought." When such
a morning dawns, one demands, by right of his own nature, the pilotage
of great thoughts to some height whence the whole world will lie before
him; one knows by unclouded insight that life is greater than all his
dreams, and that he is heir, not only of the centuries, but of eternity.
Such days belong to the mountains; and when I opened my window on this
morning, I was in no doubt as to the invitation held forth by earth and
sky. There was exhilaration in the very thought of the long climb, and
at an early hour I was fast leaving the village behind me. The road
skirted the base of the mountain, and struck at once into the heart of
the wilderness, which the clustering peaks have preserved from any but
the most fleeting associations with the peopled world around. A
barrier of ancient silence and solitude soon separated me even in
thought from the familiar scenes I had left. A virginal beauty rested
upon the road, and sank deep into my own heart as I passed along; to be
silent and open-minded was enough to bring one into fellowship with the
hour and the scene. The clear, bracing air, the rustling of leaves
slowly sifting down through the lower branches, the solemn quietude,
filled the morning with a deep joy that touched the very sources of
life, and made them sweet in every thought and emotion. It was like a
new beginning in the old, old story of time; the stains of ancient
wrong, the blights of sorrow, the wrecks of hope, were gone; sweet with
the untrodden freshness of a new day lay the earth, and looked up to
the heavens with a gaze as pure and calm as their own. Somehow all
life seemed sublimated in that golden sunshine; the grosser elements
had vanished, the material had become the transparent medium of the
spiritual, the discords had blended into harmony, and one would have
heard without surprise the faint, far song of the stars. The whole
world was one vast articulate poem, and human life added its own strain
of penetrating sweetness. At last, after all these years of struggle
and failure, one was really living!
The road, slowly ascending the long wooded slope, wound its way through
the forest until it brought me to the mountain path which climbs, with
many a halt and pause, to the very summit. Dense foliage overshadows
it, a little thinner now that the hand of autumn has begun to disrobe
the trees. Great rocks often lie in the course of the path and send it
in a narrow curve around them. Sometimes one comes upon a bold ascent
up the face of a projecting cliff; sometimes one plunges into the very
heart of the shadows as they gather over the rocky channel of the brook
that later will run foaming down to the valley. Step by step one
widens his horizon, although it is only at intervals that he is able to
note his progress upward. At the base of the mountain one saw only a
circle of hills, and the long sweep of wooded slopes which converge in
the valley; gradually the horizon widens as one climbs beyond the
summit lines of the lower hills; at turns in the path, where it crosses
some rocky declivity, one looks out upon a landscape into which some
new feature enters with every new outlook; one range of hills after
another sinks below the level of vision, and discloses another strip of
undiscovered country beyond; and so one climbs, step by step, into the
glory of a new world. The solitude, the silence, the radiant beauty of
the morning, the expanding sweep of hills and valleys at one's feet,
fill one with eager longing for the unbroken circle of sky at the
summit, and prepare one for the thrill of joy with which the soul
answers the outspread vision.
At last only a few rocks interpose between the summit and the last
resting-place. I wait a moment longer than I need, as one pushes back
for an instant the cup from which he has long desired to drink. I even
shun the noble vistas that open on either side, postponing to the
moment of perfect achievement the partial successes already won. But
the rocks are soon climbed, the summit is reached! The world is at my
feet--the mountain ranges like great billows, and the valleys, deep,
far, and shadowy, between; and overhead the unbroken arch of sky
melting into illimitable space through infinite gradations of blue.
The vision which has haunted me so long with illusive hints of range
and splendour is mine at last, and I have no greeting for it but the
breathless eagerness with which I turn from point to point, as if to
drink all in with one compelling glance. But the landscape does not
yield its infinite variety to the first nor to the second glance; the
agitation of the first outlook gives place to a deep, calm joy; the
eager desire to possess on the instant what has been won by long toil
and patience is followed by a quiet mood which banishes all thought of
self, and waits upon the hour and the scene for the revelation they
will make in their own good time. Slowly the noble landscape reveals
itself to me in its vast range and its marvellous variety. The sombre
groups of mountains to the west become distinct and majestic as I look
into their deep recesses; far off to the north the massive bulk and
impressive outlines of a solitary peak grow upon me until it seems to
dominate the whole country-side. A kingly mountain truly, of whose
"night of pines" our saintly poet has sung; from this distance a vast
and softened shadow against the stainless sky. To the east one sees
the long uplands, with slender spires rising here and there from
clustered homes; to the south, a vast stretch of fertile fields,
rolling like a fruitful sea to the horizon; within the mighty circle,
groups of lower hills, wooded valleys shadowy and mysterious in the
distance, villages and scattered homes.
It was a deep saying of Goethe's that "on every height there lies
repose." A Sabbath stillness and solemnity reign in this upper sphere,
where the sound of human toil never comes and the cry of humanity never
penetrates. The boundaries that confine and baffle the vision along
the walks of ordinary life have all faded out; great States lie
together in this outlook without visible lines of division or
separation. The obstacles to sight which hourly baffle and confuse are
gone; from horizon to horizon all things are clear and visible, and the
world is vast and beautiful to its remotest boundaries. The repose
which lies on the heights of life is born of the vast and unclouded
vision which looks down upon all obstacles, over all barriers, and
takes in at a glance the mighty scope of human activity and the
unbroken sky which overhangs it continually like a visible infinity.
On such heights it is the blessed reward of a few elect souls to live;
but the paths thither are open to every traveller.