seems to gild with glowing beams the rugged peaks of the
higher crags.
What an indescribably strange sensation it is to find that
you are utterly alone in a savage land, and that do what
you might it would take months of arduous travel to enable
you to exchange a word freely in your own tongue! As I
sit watching the hushing hand of Nature gradually calming
the world to rest, the solitude and silence seem to release
the springs of thought and prompt the mind to ponder on
the hidden mysteries of creation and their unfathomable
problems.
At such moments how grand are the ideas that course
through the mind—to die as soon as they are born! How
could any one help being struck with the vain nothingness
of his personality, as a veritable dot of dust sitting remote
and alone amidst a vastness of an almost audible stillness ?
Outstretched before me were those grand natural monuments
of granite, on whose adamantine sides were inscribed
the evidences of numberless epochs of the primeval world.
Comparison is one of the privileges, or perhaps weaknesses,
of man. Let us compare our lives to these rocks. What
can be said of the short span of human existence when
considered in relation to the age of those hoary heaps of
Solid stone ? Such a question must overwhelm the littleness
of the greatest mind.
I t matters not how high may be the pitch of culture to
which the intellect may have been elevated, it cannot
approach any nearer to the infinite than the crudest conception
of the aboriginal mind.
And what is the endurance of these mountains in their
present form compared with the physical history of the,
Universe ? Not more than a flash of light which twinkles for
an instant upon a transient wave. Time has here given one
A BROKEN REVERIE. 195
of its most unanswerable challenges to man. The attempt
at definition would be as fruitless as the ponderings of
a mortal mind upon the boundless infinity of space, through
which, as I gaze, the sun is spreading far-reaching gleams
of its dying glories.
I watch the orb of day as it sinks slowly to rest and
leaves the blackness of night. As I look my eyelids
seem to stretch wider and wider, and I feel as if I could,
without a sigh, sink to rest in sympathy with silent Nature.
Suddenly, with the gathering gloom, the spell is broken.
I awake from this trance-like reverie. Higher thoughts
vanish like the fleeting phantoms of a dream. I find myself
once again an atom of ordinary mortality, and under the
faint light of the friendly stars sparkling in the firmament,
I with difficulty wend my way back to the busy camp.