Now they embrace the
torrent in their great, black arms; and now, flashing laughter and
babbling defiance through rifted rocks and uprooted pines, the torrent
shoots past them, down into some fathomless abyss. These old Alp
mothers cannot hold their offspring back from abysses any better than
poor earth mothers.
There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human
thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery answers to the
melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of
the Book of Job.
These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears, - these
traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations, - suggest the idea
of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most
vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract.
"For, surely, the mountain, falling, cometh to nought;
The rock is remored out of his place;
The waters wear the stones;
Thou washest away the things that grow out of the earth,
And thou destroyest the hopes of man;
Thou prevailest against him, and he passeth;
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away."
The sceptical inquirer into the mysteries of eternal things might
here, if ever, feel the solemn irony of Eliphaz the Temanite:
