Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so! Give me thy hand, celestial; so!--_Merry Wives of Windsor._
It was the close of a bright sunshiny day in the spring of 18--. The sun was setting crimson on the lonely peak of the Zugspitz in the heart of the Bavarian Highlands, and the shadows of the pine woods which fringed the melancholy gorges beneath were lengthening towards the valleys.
Through one of these mountain gorges, following a rocky footpath, a man was rapidly walking. He was roughly, almost rudely, dressed in a sort of tourist suit. On his head he wore a broadbrimmed felt hat of the shape frequently worn by clergymen, and in his hand he carried a staff like a shepherd’s crook.
Scarcely looking to left or right, but hastening with impatient paces he hurried onward, less like a man hastening to some eagerly-sought shelter, than like one flying from some hated thing behind his back. His cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes wild and sad. From time to time he slackened his speed, and looked wearily around him--up to the desolate sunlit peaks, down the darkening valley with its green pastures, belts of woodland, and fields of growing corn.
But whichever way he looked, he seemed to find no joy in the prospect, indeed hardly to behold the thing he looked on, but to gaze through it and beyond it on some sorrowful portent.
Sometimes where the path became unusually steep and dangerous, he sprang from rock to rock with reckless haste, or when its thread was broken, as frequently happened by some brawling mountain stream, he entered the torrent without hesitation, and passed recklessly across. Indeed, the man seemed utterly indifferent to physical conditions, but labouring rather under some spiritual possession, completely and literally realising in his person the words of the poet:
Come to him thus, and drave the weary wight along.
The wild scene was in complete harmony with his condition. It was still and desolate, no sound seeming to break its solemn silence; but pausing and listening intently, one would in reality have become conscious of many sounds--the deep under-murmur of the mountain streams, the ‘sough’ of the wind in the pine woods, the faint tinkling of goat-bells from the distant valleys, the solitary cry of rock doves from the mountain caves.