The wind must roar awfully there in the winter;
but the mountains stand away with their avalanches, and all the
summer long keep the cold off the grassy fields.
The same evening, he was already weary. The next morning it rained.
It rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the
morrow. In the evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The
sun was setting. The snow-peaks were faintly tinged with rose, and
the ragged masses of vapour that hung lazy and leaden-coloured about
the sides of the abyss, were partially dyed a sulky orange red.
Then all faded into gray. But as the sunlight vanished, a veil
sank from the face of the moon, already half-way to the zenith, and
she gathered courage and shone, till the mountain looked lovely as a
ghost in the gleam of its snow and the glimmer of its glaciers.
'Ah!' thought Falconer, 'such a peace at last is all a man can look
for--the repose of a spectral Elysium, a world where passion has
died away, and only the dim ghost of its memory to disturb with a
shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming years. The
religion that can do but this much is not a very great or very
divine thing. The human heart cannot invent a better it may be, but
it can imagine grander results.
He did not yet know what the religion was of which he spoke. As
well might a man born stone-deaf estimate the power of sweet sounds,
or he who knows not a square from a circle pronounce upon the study
of mathematics.
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