The quiet, wide and deep, folded him
in, forced his trivial heat into silence and thought. The world
seemed to think there. Quiet in the dead seas of fog, that
filled the valleys like restless vapour curdled into silence;
quiet in the listening air, stretching gray up to the stars,--in
the solemn mountains, that stood motionless, like hoary-headed
prophets, waiting with uplifted hands, day and night, to hear the
Voice, silent now for centuries; the very air, heavy with the
breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like
some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a
peace on earth. This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in
the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and
hungry world,--a dead torpor of indifference. Years of hot and
turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the
night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with
the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him
in, to accept the great prophetic calm. He was blind to the
prophecy written on the earth since the day God first bade it
tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.
He turned from the night in-doors. Human hearts were his proper
study. The old house, he thought, slept with the rest. One did
not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow.
The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the
pulse of human life. Yet life in the veins of these people
flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and
life-long.
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