and here there is always a breath of cooler air when
the fields glow with intense heat. In such places Nature waits to
touch the fevered spirit with something of her own peace, and to keep
alive forever in the hearts of men that faith in things unseen which
rises like a spring from the depths, and makes a centre of fruitful and
beautiful life.

Chapter XIV

On the Heights

Nature creates days for special insights and outlooks--days whose
distinctive qualities make them part of the universal revelation of the
year. There are days for the deep woods, and for the open fields; days
for the beach, and for the inland river; days for solitary musing
beside some secluded rivulet, and days for the companionship and
movement of the highways. Each day is fitted by some subtle magic of
adaptation to the place and the aspect of nature which it is to reveal
with a clearness denied to other hours. There came such a day not long
ago to me; a day of tonic atmosphere--clear, cloudless, inspiring;
there was no audible invitation in the air, but I knew by some instinct
that the day and the mountains were parts of one complete whole. The
morning itself was a new birth of nature, full of promise and prophecy;
one of those hours in which only the greatest and noblest things are
credible, in which one rejects unfaith and doubt and all lesser and
meaner things as dreams of a night from which there has come an eternal
awakening; a day such as Emerson had in thought when he wrote: "The
scholar must look long for the right hour for Plato's Timaeus. At last
the elect morning arrives, the early dawn--a few lights conspicuous in
the heaven, as of a world just created and still becoming--and in its
wide leisure we dare open that book. There are days when the great are
near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even;
when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought." When such
a morning dawns, one demands, by right of his own nature, the pilotage
of great thoughts to some height whence the whole world will lie before
him; one knows by unclouded insight that life is greater than all his
dreams, and that he is heir, not only of the centuries, but of eternity.

Such days belong to the mountains; and when I opened my window on this
morning, I was in no doubt as to the invitation held forth by earth and
sky. There was exhilaration in the very thought of the long climb, and
at an early hour I was fast leaving