"In my mountaineering wandering I have not seen a more beautiful valley than this ... this valley of peace and perfect beauty where the human spirit may find repose."
The
"All about me was the great peacefulness of the hills, a peacefulness so perfect that something within me seemed to strain upwards as though to catch the notes of an immortal harmony. There seemed in this peace and quietude some Presence, some all-pervading beauty separated from me only by my own "muddy vesture of decay."
The stars, and the hills beneath the stars, the flowers at my feet were part of a supreme Purpose which I myself must struggle to fulfill. Poor little man, , from ignoble depths to starry heights, from hill-top to valley in a reckless run, how hard and wearisome the climb, how besetting the winds and difficulties. Surely the hills were made that we should appreciate our strength and frailties? The stars that we should sense our destiny? Yet through this tangled skein of earthly life must run the golden thread of beauty. Beauty is everywhere; we need not go to the hills to find it. Peacefulness is everywhere if we make it so; we need not go to the hills to seek it.
Yet because we are human and endowed with physical qualities, and because we cannot divorce ourselves from these qualities we must needs utilise them as best we can and seek through them beauty that we may return refreshed in mind and spirit. So we go to seek beauty on a hill, the beauty of a larger freedom, the beauty that lifts us to a high window of our fleshy prison whence we may see a little further over the dry and dusty plains to the blue ranges and eternal snows. So we climb the hills , pitting our strength against difficulty, enduring hardship, discomfort and danger that through a subjugation of body we may perceive beauty and discover a contentment of spirit beyond all earthly imaginings. And through beauty and contentment we gain peace".
F.S.Smythe (1938), The
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