Breathing the air of its highest region, he found himself vaguely strengthened, yes comforted.One peculiar feeling he had, into which I could enter only upon happy occasion, of the presence of God in the wind.He said the wind up there on the heights of human aspiration always made him long and pray.Asking him one day something about his going to church so seldom, he answered thus:
'My dear boy, it does me ten times more good to get outside the spire than to go inside the church.The spire is the most essential, and consequently the most neglected part of the building.
It symbolizes the aspiration without which no man's faith can hold its own.But the effort of too many of her priests goes to conceal from the worshippers the fact that there is such a stair, with a door to it out of the church.It looks as if they feared their people would desert them for heaven.But I presume it arises generally from the fact that they know of such an ascent themselves, only by hearsay.The knowledge of God is good, but the church is better!'
'Could it be,' I ventured to suggest, 'that, in order to ascend, they must put off the priests' garments?'
'Good, my boy!' he answered.'All are priests up there, and must be clothed in fine linen, clean and white--the righteousness of saints--not the imputed righteousness of another,--that is a lying doctrine--but their own righteousness which God has wrought in them by Christ.' I never knew a man in whom the inward was so constantly clothed upon by the outward, whose ordinary habits were so symbolic of his spiritual tastes, or whose enjoyment of the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears was so much informed by his highest feelings.He regarded all human affairs from the heights of religion, as from their church-spires he looked down on the red roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of Cologne, on the gray roofs of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of Basel--uplifted for the time above them, not in dissociation from them.
On the base of the missing twin-spire at Strasburg, high over the roof of the church, stands a little cottage--how strange its white muslin window-curtains look up there! To the day of his death he cherished the fancy of writing a book in that cottage, with the grand city to which London looks a modern mushroom, its thousand roofs with row upon row of windows in them--often five garret stories, one above the other, and its thickets of multiform chimneys, the thrones and procreant cradles of the storks, marvellous in history, habit, and dignity--all below him.
He was taken ill at Valence and lay there for a fortnight, oppressed with some kind of low fever.One night he awoke from a refreshing sleep, but could not sleep again.It seemed to him afterwards as if he had lain waiting for something.Anyhow something came.As it were a faint musical rain had invaded his hearing; but the night was clear, for the moon was shining on his window-blind.The sound came nearer, and revealed itself a delicate tinkling of bells.It drew nearer still and nearer, growing in sweet fulness as it came, till at length a slow torrent of tinklings went past his window in the street below.It was the flow of a thousand little currents of sound, a gliding of silvery threads, like the talking of water-ripples against the side of a barge in a slow canal--all as soft as the moonlight, as exquisite as an odour, each sound tenderly truncated and dull.A great multitude of sheep was shifting its quarters in the night, whence and whither and why he never knew.To his heart they were the messengers of the Most High.For into that heart, soothed and attuned by their thin harmony, not on the wind that floated without breaking their lovely message, but on the ripples of the wind that bloweth where it listeth, came the words, unlooked for, their coming unheralded by any mental premonition, 'My peace I give unto you.' The sounds died slowly away in the distance, fainting out of the air, even as they had grown upon it, but the words remained.
In a few moments he was fast asleep, comforted by pleasure into repose; his dreams were of gentle self-consoling griefs; and when he awoke in the morning--'My peace I give unto you,' was the first thought of which he was conscious.It may be that the sound of the sheep-bells made him think of the shepherds that watched their flocks by night, and they of the multitude of the heavenly host, and they of the song--'On earth peace': I do not know.The important point is not how the words came, but that the words remained--remained until he understood them, and they became to him spirit and life.
He soon recovered strength sufficiently to set out again upon his travels, great part of which he performed on foot.In this way he reached Avignon.Passing from one of its narrow streets into an open place in the midst, all at once he beheld, towering above him, on a height that overlooked the whole city and surrounding country, a great crucifix.The form of the Lord of Life still hung in the face of heaven and earth.He bowed his head involuntarily.No matter that when he drew nearer the power of it vanished.The memory of it remained with its first impression, and it had a share in what followed.
He made his way eastward towards the Alps.As he walked one day about noon over a desolate heath-covered height, reminding him not a little of the country of his childhood, the silence seized upon him.