ordinary fulness
of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago,
near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt
the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura.
It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness,
of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be
manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise
of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those
mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly
broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet
restrained; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed
each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet
waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness
pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern
expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No
frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft
Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her
forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and
changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear
green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark
quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such
company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the
blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming
forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all,
but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to
be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star,
closing every now and then into nebulae; and there was the oxalis,
troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie,[162] the
dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy
snow, and touched with ivy on the edges--ivy as light and lovely as the
vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in
sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and
mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the
wild strawberry, just a blossom or two all showered amidst the golden
softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on
the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly
from beneath, mixed with the