YET ONCE.
I am drawing my story to a close. Almost all that followed bears so
exclusively upon my internal history, that I will write but one
incident more of it. I have roamed the world, and reaped many harvests.
In the deepest agony I have never refused the consolations of Nature or
of Truth. I have never knowingly accepted any founded in falsehood, in
forgetfulness, or in distraction. Let such as have no hope in God drink
of what Lethe they can find; to me it is a river of Hell and altogether
abominable. I could not be content even to forget my sins. There can be
but one deliverance from them, namely, that God and they should come
together in my soul. In his presence I shall serenely face them.
Without him I dare not think of them. With God a man can confront
anything; without God, he is but the withered straw which the sickle of
the reaper has left standing on a wintry field. But to forget them
would be to cease and begin anew, which to one aware of his immortality
is a horror.
If comfort profound as the ocean has not yet overtaken and infolded me,
I see how such may come--perhaps will come. It must be by the enlarging
of my whole being in truth, in God, so as to give room for the storm to
rage, yet not destroy; for the sorrow to brood, yet not kill; for the
sunshine of love to return after the east wind and black frost of
bitterest disappointment; for the heart to feel the uttermost
tenderness while the arms go not forth to embrace; for a mighty heaven
of the unknown, crowded with the stars of endless possibilities, to
dawn when the sun of love has vanished, and the moon of its memory is
too ghastly to give any light: it is comfort such and thence that I
think will one day possess me. Already has not its aurora brightened
the tops of my snow-covered mountains? And if yet my valleys lie gloomy
and forlorn, is not light on the loneliest peak a sure promise of the
coming day?
Only once again have I looked in Mary’s face. I will record the
occasion, and then drop my pen.
About five years after I left home, I happened in my wanderings to be
in one of my favourite Swiss valleys--high and yet sheltered. I
rejoiced to be far up in the mountains, yet behold the inaccessible
peaks above me--mine, though not to be trodden by foot of mine--my
heart’s own, though never to yield me a moment’s outlook from their
lofty brows; for I was never strong enough to reach one mighty summit.
It was enough for me that they sent me down the glad streams from the
cold bosoms of their glaciers--the offspring of the sun and the snow;
that I too beheld the stars to which they were nearer than I.
One lovely morning I had wandered a good way from the village--a place
little frequented by visitors, where I had a lodging in the house of
the syndic--when I was overtaken by one of the sudden fogs which so
frequently render those upper regions dangerous. There was no path to
guide me back to my temporary home, but, a hundred yards or so beneath
where I had been sitting, lay that which led down to one of the best
known villages of the canton, where I could easily find shelter. I made
haste to descend.
After a couple of hours’ walking, during which the fog kept following
me, as if hunting me from its lair, I at length arrived at the level of
the valley, and was soon in one of those large hotels which in Summer
are crowded as bee-hives, and in Winter forsaken as a ruin. The season
for travellers was drawing to a close, and the house was full of
homeward-bound guests.
For the mountains will endure but a season of intrusion. If travellers
linger too long within their hospitable gates, their humour changes,
and, with fierce winds and snow and bitter sleet, they will drive them
forth, preserving their Winter privacy for the bosom friends of their
mistress, Nature. Many is the Winter since those of my boyhood which I
have spent amongst the Alps; and in such solitude I have ever found the
negation of all solitude, the one absolute Presence. David communed
with his own heart on his bed and was still--there finding God:
communing with my own heart in the Winter-valleys of Switzerland I
found at least what made me cry out: ‘Surely this is the house of God;
this is the gate of heaven!’ I would not be supposed to fancy that God
is in mountains, and not in plains--that God is in the solitude, and
not in the city: in any region harmonious with its condition and
necessities, it is easier, for the heart to be still, and in its
stillness to hear the still small voice.
Dinner was going on at the _table-d’hôte_. It was full, but a place was
found for me in a bay-window. Turning to the one side, I belonged to
the great world, represented by the Germans, Americans, and English,
with a Frenchman and Italian here and there, filling the long table;
turning to the other, I knew myself in a temple of the Most High, so
huge that it seemed empty of men. The great altar of a mighty mountain
rose, massy as a world, and ethereal as a thought, into the upturned
gulf of the twilight air--its snowy peak, ever as I turned to look,
mounting up and up to its repose. I had been playing with my own soul,
spinning it between the sun and the moon, as it were, and watching now
the golden and now the silvery side, as I glanced from the mountain to
the table, and again from the table to the mountain, when all at once I
discovered that I was searching the mountain for something--I did not
know what. Whether any tones had reached me, I cannot tell;--a man’s
mind may, even through his senses, be marvellously moved without
knowing whence the influence comes;--but there I was searching the face
of the mountain for something, with a want which had not begun to
explain itself. From base to peak my eyes went flitting and resting and
wandering again upwards. At last they reached the snowy crown, from
which they fell into the infinite blue beyond. Then, suddenly, the
unknown something I wanted was clear. The same moment I turned to the
table. Almost opposite was a face--pallid, with parted lips and fixed
eyes--gazing at me. Then I knew those eyes had been gazing at me all
the time I had been searching the face of the mountain. For one moment
they met mine and rested; for one moment, I felt as if I must throw
myself at her feet, and clasp them to my heart; but she turned her eyes
away, and I rose and left the house.
The mist was gone, and the moon was rising. I walked up the mountain
path towards my village. But long ere I reached it the sun was rising.
With his first arrow of slenderest light, the tossing waves of my
spirit began to lose their white tops, and sink again towards a distant
calm; and ere I saw the village from the first point of vision, I had
made the following verses. They are the last I will set down.
I know that I cannot move thee
To an echo of my pain,
Or a thrill of the storming trouble
That racks my soul and brain;
That our hearts through all the ages
Shall never sound in tune;
That they meet no more in their cycles
Than the parted sun and moon.
But if ever a spirit flashes
Itself on another soul,
One day, in thy stillness, a vapour
Shall round about thee roll;
And the lifting of the vapour
Shall reveal a world of pain,
Of frosted suns, and moons that wander
Through misty mountains of rain.
Thou shalt know me for one live instant--
Thou halt know me--and yet not love:
I would not have thee troubled,
My cold, white-feathered dove!
I would only once come near thee--Myself,
and not my form;
Then away in the distance wander,
A slow-dissolving storm.
The vision should pass in vapour,
That melts in aether again;
Only a something linger-Not
pain, but the shadow of pain.
And I should know that thy spirit
On mine one look had sent;
And glide away from thy knowledge,
And try to be half-content.