e House
Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him. He
looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The Valley of
Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious,
melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in the
spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and make
the woods and groves and solitary places glad." Side by side with the
good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green and
lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over," through "meadows
beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but fresh-faced shepherd-
boy, who lived a merry life, and wore the herb heartsease in his bosom,
sounded through his cell:--

"He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low no pride."

The broad and pleasant "river of the Water of Life" glided peacefully
before him, fringed "on either side with green trees, with all manner of
fruit," and leaves of healing, with "meadows beautified with lilies, and
green all the year long;" he saw the Delectable Mountains, glorious with
sunshine, overhung with gardens and orchards and vineyards; and beyond
all, the Land of Beulah, with its eternal sunshine, its song of birds,
its music of fountains, its purple clustered vines, and groves through
which walked the Shining Ones, silver-winged and beautiful.

What were bars and bolts and prison-walls to him, whose eyes were
anointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and the
rejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to its
golden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the sounding
trumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweet
voices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and the
songs of the redeemed ones? In reading the concluding pages of the first
part of Pilgrim's Progress, we feel as if the mysterious glory of the
Beatific Vision was unveiled before us. We are dazzled with the excess
of light. We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by the
great anthem of rejoicing spirits. It can only be adequately described
in the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as "a seven-fold
chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."

Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old English
confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled and in
the end overcame