{ 321}The heathen were indeed blind in their thoughts upon the grandeur of nature. What is our earth, but a narrow pass between two eternal worlds! Down there, beneath our feet, are the damned and their pains; they howl in their caverns and the earth trembles; without the sign of God, these walls would to-morrow be swallowed up in their abyss; they often come out thence by the bare precipices; the passers-by hear their shouts of laughter in the cascades; behind those gnarled beeches, glimpses have been caught of their grimacing countenances, their eyes of flame, and more than one herdsman, wandering at night towards their haunt, has been found in the morning with hair on end and twisted neck. But up there, in the azure, above the crystal, are the angels; many a time has the vault opened, and, in a long trail of light, the saints have appeared more radiant than molten silver, suddenly visible, then all at once vanished. A monk saw them; the last abbot was informed by them, in a vision, of the spring which healed his diseases. Another, long time ago, hunting wild beasts one day, saw a great stag stop before him with eyes filled with tears; when he had looked, he saw upon its antlers the cross of Jesus Christ, fell on his knees, and, on his { 322}return to the convent, lived for thirty years doing penance in his cell, without any desire to leave it. Another, a very young man, who had gone into a forest of pines, heard far off a nightingale which sang marvellously; he drew near in astonishment, and it seemed to him that everything was transfigured; the brooks flowed as it were a long stream of tears, and again seemed full of pearls; the violet fringes of the firs shone magnificently, like a stole, upon their funereal trunks. The rays ran along the leaves, empurpled and azured as if by cathedral windows; flowers of gold and velvet opened their bleeding hearts in the midst of the rocks. He approached the bird, which he could not see among the branches, but which sang like the finest organ, with notes so piercing and so tender, that his heart was at once torn and melted. He saw nothing more of what was about him, and it seemed to him that his soul detached itself from his breast, and went away to the bird, and mingled itself with the voice which rose ever vibrating more and more in a song of ecstasy and anguish, as if it had been the inner voice of Christ to his Father when he was dying on the cross. When he returned towards the convent, he was astonished to find that the walls, which were quite new, had become brown as through age, that the little lindens in the garden were now great trees, that no face among the { 323}monks was familiar to him, and that no one remembered to have seen him. Finally an infirm old monk called to mind that in former times they had talked to him of a novice who had gone, a hundred years before, into the pine forest, but who had not come back, so that no one had ever known what had happened to him. Thus transported and forgotten will those live who shall hear the inner voices. God envelops us, and we have only to abandon ourselves to him in order to feel him.