All day a dropping cloud had filled the space below, so that the hills on the opposite side of the valley were hidden, and the whole of the sea, near as it was.But when we went to the window we found that a great change had silently taken place.The mist continued to veil the sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the rising curtain of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their bases, revealing a great part of the sea and shore, and half of a cliff on the opposite side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep red, was now smitten by the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over the waters a splendour of carmine.As we gazed, the vaporous curtain sank upon the shore, and the sun sank under the waves, and the sad gray evening closed in the weeping night, and clouds and darkness swathed the weary earth.For doubtless the earth needs its night as well as the creatures that live thereon.
In the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds remained.But they were high in the heavens now, and, like a departing sorrow, revealed the outline and form which had appeared before as an enveloping vapour of universal and shapeless evil.The mist was now far enough off to be seen and thought about.It was clouds now--no longer mist and rain.And I thought how at length the evils of the world would float away, and we should see what it was that made it so hard for us to believe and be at peace.
In the afternoon the sky had partially cleared, but clouds hid the sun as he sank towards the west.We walked out.A cold autumnal wind blew, not only from the twilight of the dying day, but from the twilight of the dying season.A sorrowful hopeless wind it seemed, full of the odours of dead leaves--those memories of green woods, and of damp earth--the bare graves of the flowers.Would the summer ever come again?
We were pacing in silence along a terraced walk which overhung the shore far below.More here than from the hilltop we seemed to look immediately into space, not even a parapet intervening betwixt us and the ocean.The sound of a mournful lyric, never yet sung, was in my brain; it drew nearer to my mental grasp; but ere it alighted, its wings were gone, and it fell dead on my consciousness.Its meaning was this: 'Welcome, Requiem of Nature.Let me share in thy Requiescat.Blow, wind of mournful memories.Let us moan together.
No one taketh from us the joy of our sorrow.We may mourn as we will.'
But while I brooded thus, behold a wonder! The mass about the sinking sun broke up, and drifted away in cloudy bergs, as if scattered on the diverging currents of solar radiance that burst from the gates of the west, and streamed east and north and south over the heavens and over the sea.To the north, these masses built a cloudy bridge across the sky from horizon to horizon, and beneath it shone the rosy-sailed ships floating stately through their triumphal arch up the channel to their home.Other clouds floated stately too in the upper sea over our heads, with dense forms, thinning into vaporous edges.Some were of a dull angry red; some of as exquisite a primrose hue as ever the flower itself bore on its bosom; and betwixt their edges beamed out the sweetest, purest, most melting, most transparent blue, the heavenly blue which is the symbol of the spirit as red is of the heart.I think I never saw a blue to satisfy me before.Some of these clouds threw shadows of many-shaded purple upon the green sea; and from one of the shadows, so dark and so far out upon the glooming horizon that it looked like an island, arose as from a pier, a wondrous structure of dim, fairy colours, a multitude of rainbow-ends, side by side, that would have spanned the heavens with a gorgeous arch, but failed from the very grandeur of the idea, and grew up only a few degrees against the clouded west.I stood rapt.The two Falconers were at some distance before me, walking arm in arm.They stood and gazed likewise.It was as if God had said to the heavens and the earth and the chord of the seven colours, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.' And I said to my soul, 'Let the tempest rave in the world;let sorrow wail like a sea-bird in the midst thereof; and let thy heart respond to her shivering cry; but the vault of heaven encloses the tempest and the shrieking bird and the echoing heart; and the sun of God's countenance can with one glance from above change the wildest winter day into a summer evening compact of poets' dreams.'
My companions were walking up over the hill.I could see that Falconer was earnestly speaking in his father's ear.The old man's head was bent towards the earth.I kept away.They made a turn from home.I still followed at a distance.The evening began to grow dark.The autumn wind met us again, colder, stronger, yet more laden with the odours of death and the frosts of the coming winter.
But it no longer blew as from the charnel-house of the past; it blew from the stars through the chinks of the unopened door on the other side of the sepulchre.It was a wind of the worlds, not a wind of the leaves.It told of the march of the spheres, and the rest of the throne of God.We were going on into the universe--home to the house of our Father.Mighty adventure! Sacred repose! And as I followed the pair, one great star throbbed and radiated over my head.