The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

I am not going to say which I like best, the seashore or the mountains. The one where your place is, is the best for you; but this difference there is—you can domesticate mountains. The sea is feline. It licks your feet, its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence.

"If I thought I should ever see the Alps!" said the schoolmistress.

"Perhaps you might some time or other," I said.

"It is not very likely," she answered.

Tableau. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground, two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman—oh—ah—yes!—the other a lady, leaning on his shoulder. (The reader will understand this was an internal, private, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own consciousness.)

*****

I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together. I found the effect of going out every morning was decidedly favourable on her health. I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. Better too few words from the woman we love than too many; while she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks she works for herself. Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

Nature's Patient Advance

I don't know anything sweeter than the leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or so of earth which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-tops and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, "What are these people about?" And the small herbs look up and whisper back, "We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the night wind steals to them and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly with it into the great city—one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marble over a rich gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone, where nothing but a man is buried—and there they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery railings.

Listen to them when there is only a light breath stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, "Wait awhile." The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs, "Wait awhile." By and by the flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants—the smaller tribes always in front—saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have camped in the market-place. Wait long enough, and you will find an old doting oak hugging in its yellow underground arms a huge worn block that was the cornerstone of the State-house. Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

The Long Path

It was in talking of life that the schoolmistress and I came nearest together. I thought I knew something about that. The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets with a single soul greater than all the living pageant that passes before it. This was one of them. Fortune had left her, sorrow had baptised her. Yet as I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness that was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and lip and every shifting lineament were made for love.

I never addressed a word of love to the schoolmistress in the course of these pleasant walks. It seemed as if we talked of everything but love on that particular morning. There was, perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but somehow I could not command myself just then so well as usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer which was to leave at noon—with the condition of being released if circumstances occurred to detain me. The schoolmistress knew nothing about this, of course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking. The boulevard of the Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different directions. One of these runs across the whole length of the Common. We called it the "long path," and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed—though of a tolerably robust habit—as we came opposite to the head of this path on that morning. I think I tried to speak twice, without making myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the question, "Will you take the long path with me?" "Certainly," said the schoolmistress, "with much pleasure." "Think," I said, "before you answer. If you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more."