CHAPTER XXXIX. 



Mountains The Lochaber Axe, Ancient and Modern. 



WITH occasional gales, by no means out of place or untimeous at 

 this date [October 1873], with the sun already in its retrogression, 

 almost half-way back through Scorpio, the weather is upon the 

 whole mild and more autumn-like than was any portion of autumn 

 proper itself. Winter, as yet, has hardly descended lower than the 

 highest summits of our mountain ranges, and how beautiful in the 

 golden after-glow, even at this season, are these same mountain 

 peaks, impending over us like so many living presences ! Tutelary- 

 divinities we sometimes fancy them, interested in all that belongs 

 to the dwellers at their feet, with living hearts under their rocky 

 ribs, loving us even as we love them, if we only knew it, and 

 speaking to us in their own solemn and mysterious language, as at 

 midnight, in our communings with the stars, we are startled now 

 and again by the weird, inexplicable sighs and sounds, and deep- 

 toned murmurings that seem to rise from glen and corry and 

 frowning gorge sounds of much meaning, doubtless, if one only 

 knew the language, and could respond, as the sea seems to do, in 

 the palpitation of its heaving waves, and the boom of its billows 

 upon the beach. Pantheism and atheism are the very antithesis 

 and antipodes of each other errors both, just as blind credulity is 

 the antithesis of stubborn unbelief but, if forced to decide in 

 favour of either, give us pantheism for choice, as the more poetical, 

 at least, and pardonable error of the two ; for the recognition of a 

 Divine intelligence pervading and dwelling lovingly in all things is 



