pool that I paused at last, and seated myself with
infinite content. Before me the glen narrowed into a rocky chasm, over
which the adventurous trees that clung to the precipitous hillsides
spread a dense roof of foliage. The dark pool at my feet was full of
mysterious shadows and seemed to cover epochs of buried history. As I
studied its motionless surface the old mediaeval legends of black,
fathomless pools came back to me, and I felt the air of enchantment
stealing over me, lulling my latter-day scepticism into sleep, and
making all mysteries rational and all marvels probable. In these
silent depths no magical art had ever submerged cities or castles; on
the stillest of all quiet afternoons no muffled echoes, faint and far,
float up through the waveless waters. But who knows what shadows have
sunk into these sunless depths; what reflections of waving branches,
what sittings of subdued light, what hushed echoes of the forgotten
summers that perished here ages ago?

In such a place, at such an hour, one feels the most subtle and the
most searching spell which Nature ever throws over those that seek her;
a spell woven of many charms, magical potions, and powerful
incantations. The quiet of the place, awful with the unbroken silence
of centuries; the soft, half light, which conceals more than it
discloses; the retreating trunks of trees interlacing their branches
against invasion from light or heat or sound; the steep ravine,
receding in darker and darker distance, until it seems like one of the
fabled passages to the under world: the wide, shadowy pool, into which
no sunlight falls, and in which night itself seems to sleep under the
very eyes of day--all these things speak a language which even the
dullest must understand. As I sit musing, conscious of the darkest
shadows and deepest mysteries close at hand, and yet undisturbed by
them, I recall that one of the noblest poems on Death ever written was
inspired in this place; and I note without surprise, as its solemn
lines come back to me, that there is no horror in it, no ignoble fear,
but awe and reverence and the sublimity of a great and hopeful thought.
The organ music of those slow-moving verses seems like the very voice
of a place out of which all dread has gone from the thought of death,
and where the brief span of life seems to arch the abyss of death with
immortality.

Chapter X

The Earliest Insights

The heaven which lies about us in our infa