After ascending for hours in zigzags through pine woods, where the only sound was of the little streams trotting down to the valley below, or the distant hush of some thin waterfall, he reached a level, and came out of the woods.The path now led along the edge of a precipice descending sheer to the uppermost terrace of the valley he had left.The valley was but a cleft in the mass of the mountain: a little way over sank its other wall, steep as a plumb-line could have made it, of solid rock.On his right lay green fields of clover and strange grasses.Ever and anon from the cleft steamed up great blinding clouds of mist, which now wandered about over the nations of rocks on the mountain side beyond the gulf, now wrapt himself in their bewildering folds.In one moment the whole creation had vanished, and there seemed scarce existence enough left for more than the following footstep; the next, a mighty mountain stood in front, crowned with blinding snow, an awful fact;the lovely heavens were over his head, and the green sod under his feet; the grasshoppers chirped about him, and the gorgeous butterflies flew.From regions far beyond came the bells of the kine and the goats.He reached a little inn, and there took up his quarters.
I am able to be a little minute in my description, because I have since visited the place myself.Great heights rise around it on all sides.It stands as between heaven and hell, suspended between peaks and gulfs.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.
The next morning rose brilliant--an ideal summer day.He would not go yet; he would spend one day more in the place.He opened his valise to get some lighter garments.His eye fell on a New Testament.Dr.Anderson had put it there.He had never opened it yet, and now he let it lie.Its time had not yet come.He went out.
Walking up the edge of the valley, he came upon a little stream whose talk he had heard for some hundred yards.It flowed through a grassy hollow, with steeply sloping sides.Water is the same all the world over; but there was more than water here to bring his childhood back to Falconer.For at the spot where the path led him down to the burn, a little crag stood out from the bank,--a gray stone like many he knew on the stream that watered the valley of Rothieden: on the top of the stone grew a little heather; and beside it, bending towards the water, was a silver birch.He sat down on the foot of the rock, shut in by the high grassy banks from the gaze of the awful mountains.The sole unrest was the run of the water beside him, and it sounded so homely, that he began to jabber Scotch to it.He forgot that this stream was born in the clouds, far up where that peak rose into the air behind him; he did not know that a couple of hundred yards from where he sat, it tumbled headlong into the valley below: with his country's birch-tree beside him, and the rock crowned with its tuft of heather over his head, the quiet as of a Sabbath afternoon fell upon him--that quiet which is the one altogether lovely thing in the Scotch Sabbath--and once more the words arose in his mind, 'My peace I give unto you.'
Now he fell a-thinking what this peace could be.And it came into his mind as he thought, that Jesus had spoken in another place about giving rest to those that came to him, while here he spoke about 'my peace.' Could this my mean a certain kind of peace that the Lord himself possessed? Perhaps it was in virtue of that peace, whatever it was, that he was the Prince of Peace.Whatever peace he had must be the highest and best peace--therefore the one peace for a man to seek, if indeed, as the words of the Lord seemed to imply, a man was capable of possessing it.He remembered the New Testament in his box, and, resolving to try whether he could not make something more out of it, went back to the inn quieter in heart than since he left his home.In the evening he returned to the brook, and fell to searching the story, seeking after the peace of Jesus.
He found that the whole passage stood thus:--'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you.Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'