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MOUNTAIN AND CRAG.

Faust. For me this mountain mass rests nobly dumb;
I ask not whence it is, nor why 'tis come?
Herself when Nature in herself did found

This globe of earth, she then did purely round;
The summit and abyss her pleasure made,
Mountain to mountain, rock to rock she laid;
The hillocks down she neatly fashion'd then,
To valleys soften'd them with gentle train.
Then all grew green and bloom'd, and in her joy
She needs no foolish spoutings to employ.
Mephistopheles. So say ye! It seems clear as noon to ye,
Yet he knows who was there the contrary.

I was hard by below, when seething flame
Swelled the abyss, and streaming fire forth came;
When Moloch's hammer forging rock to rock,
Far flew the fragment-cliffs beneath the shock :
Of masses strange and huge the land was full;
Who clears away such piles of hurl'd misrule?
Philosophers the reason cannot see ;

There lies the rock, and they must let it be.
We have reflected till ashamed we've grown ;
The common folk can thus conceive alone,
And in conception no disturbance know,
Their wisdom ripen'd has long while ago:
A miracle it is, they Satan honour show.
My wanderer on faith's crutches hobbles on
Towards the devil's bridge and devil's stone.1

191

The great American poet made his pilgrimage to the mountain so beautiful in the distance, thinking to find there the men of equal elevation. Did not Milton describe Freedom as 'a mountain.nymph?'

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192

ALPINE PEASANTS.

Like wise preceptor, lure his eye
To sound the science of the sky.

But instead of finding there the man using those crags as a fastness to fight pollution of the mind, he

searched the region round

And in low hut my monarch found:
He was no eagle, and no earl ;—
Alas! my foundling was a churl,
With heart of cat and eyes of bug,

Dull victim of his pipe and mug.1

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Ruskin has the same gloomy report to make of the mountaineers of Europe. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil among them. Perhaps more.' Is it not strange to reflect that hardly an evening passes in London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,-poetically minded,delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock? that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of peasants, in gay ribbons and white bodices, singing sweet songs and bowing gracefully to the picturesque crosses; and all the while the veritable peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to veritable crosses in another temper than the kind and fair audiences dream of, and assuredly with another kind of answer than is got out of the opera catastrophe.' 2

The writer remembers well the emphasis with which a poor woman at whose cottage he asked the path to the Natural Bridge in Virginia said, 'I don't know why so many people come to these rocks; for my part, give me a

1 'Emerson's Poems. Monadnoc.'

2 'Modern Painters,' Part V. 19.

HOLY AND UNHOLY MOUNTS.

193

level country. Many ages lay between that aged crone and Emerson or Ruskin, and they were ages of heavy war with the fortresses of nature. The fabled ordeals of water and fire through which the human race passed were associated with Ararat and Sinai, because to migrating or farming man the mountain was always an ordeal, irrespective even of its torrents or its occasional lava-streams. A terrible vista is opened by the cry of Lot, 'I cannot escape to the mountain lest some evil take me!' Not even the fire consuming Sodom in the plains could nerve him to dare cope with the demons of the steep places. As time went on, devotees proved to the awe-stricken peasantries their sanctity and authority by combating those mountain. demons, and erecting their altars in the 'high places.' So many summits became sacred. But this very sanctity was the means of bringing on successive demoniac hordes to haunt them; for every new religion saw in those altars in 'high places' not victories over demons, but demon-shrines. And thus mountains became the very battlefields between rival deities, each demon to his or her rival; and the conflict lasts from the cursing of the 'high places' by the priests of Israel1 to the Devil's Pulpits of the Alps and Apennines. Among the beautiful frescoes at Baden is that of the Angel's and the Devil's Pulpit, by Götzenberger. Near Gernsbach, appropriately at the point where the cultivable valley meets the unconquerable crests of rock, stand the two pulpits from which Satan and an Angel contended, when the first christian missionaries had failed to convert the rude foresters. When, by the Angel's eloquence, all were won from the Devil's side. except a few witches and usurers, the fiend tore up great masses of rock and built the Devil's Mill' on the moun

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1 Bel's mountain, 'House of the Beloved,' is called 'high place' in Assyrian, and would be included in these curses (Records of the Past,' iii. 129).

VOL. I.

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tain-top; and he was hurled down by the Almighty on the rocks near Lord's Meadow,' where the marks of his claws may still be seen, and where, by a diminishing number of undiminished ears, his groans are still heard when a storm rages through the valley.

Such conflicts as these have been in some degree associated with every mountain of holy or unholy fame. Each was in its time a prosaic Hill Difficulty, with lions by no means chained, to affright the hearts of Mistrust and Timorous, till Dervish or Christian impressed there his holy footprint, visible from Adam's Peak to Olivet, or built there his convents, discernible from Meru and Olympus to Pontyprydd and St. Catharine's Hill. By necessary truces the demons and deities repair gradually to their respective summits,-Seir and Sinai hold each their own. But the Holy Hills have never equalled the number of Dark Mountains1 dreaded by man. These obstructive demons made the mountains Moul-ge and Nin-ge, names for the King and Queen of the Accadian Hell; they made the Finnish Mount Kippumaki the abode of all Pests. They have identified their name (Elf) with the Alps, given nearly every tarn an evil fame, and indeed created a special class of demons, 'Montagnards,' much dreaded by mediæval miners, whose faces they sometimes twisted so that they must look backward physically, as they were much in the habit of doing mentally, for ever afterward. Gervais of Tilbury, in his Chronicle, declares that on the top of Mount Canigon in France, which has a very inaccessible summit, there is a black lake of unknown depth, at whose bottom the demons have a palace, and that if any one drops a stone into that water, the wrath of the mountain demons is shown in sudden and frightful tempests. From a like tarn in Cornwall, as Cornish Folklore claims, 1 Jer. xiii. 16.

TEN-JO.

195 on an accessible but very tedious hill, came up the hand which received the brand Escalibore when its master could wield it no more,-as told in the Morte D'Arthur, with, however, clear reference to the sea.

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I cannot forbear enlivening my page with the following sketch of a visit of English officers to the realm of Ten-jo, the long-nosed Mountain-demon of Japan, which is very suggestive of the mental atmosphere amid which such spectres exist. The mountains and forests of Japan are, say these writers, inhabited as thickly by good and evil spirits as the Hartz and Black Forest, and chief among them, in horrible sanctity, is O-yama,-the word echoes the Hindu Yama, Japanese Amma, kings of Hades,whose demon is Ten-jo. Abdul and Mulney once started, on three days' leave, with the intention of climbing to the summit—not of Ten-jo's nose, but of the mountain; their principal reason for so doing being simply that they were told by every one that they had better not. They first tried the ascent on the most accessible side, but fierce two-sworded yakomins jealously guarded it; and they were obliged to make the attempt on the other, which was almost inaccessible, and was Ten-jo's region. The villagers at the base of the mountain begged them to give up the project; and one old man, a species of patriarch, reasoned with them. 'What are you going to do when you get to the top?' he asked. Our two friends were forced to admit that their course, then, would be very similar to that of the king of France and his men-come down again.

The old man laughed pityingly, and said, 'Well, go if you like; but, take my word for it, Ten-jo will do you an injury.'

They asked who Ten-jo was.

'Why Ten-jo,' said the old man, 'is an evil spirit, with

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