Valley of Humiliation

“ I condemned a variety of dishes, and arguing like the doctor of Valladolid, “Unhappy are those who require to be always on the watch, for fear of overloading their stomachs!”--Lesage, Gil Blas, vii. 5 (1735) .
Valley of Humiliation, the place where Christian encountered Apollyon, and put him to flight.--Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, i. (1678) .
Valley of the Shadow of Death, a “wilderness, a land of deserts, and of pits, a land of drought, and of the shadow of death” (Jer. ii. 6) . “The light there is darkness, and the way full of traps ... to catch the unwary.” ”

“ Bitter, terrible tears;
But the joys have warm mouths, and madness
Dances downwards with the years.
Come to me at the top of the world,
O Mine. The valley is deep,
The valley is full of the dying,
And with those that sleep. ”

“ Passing along the Valley, he will at last come to the Fields of Sorrow and Loneliness. His desires, having received at his hands neither encouragement nor sustenance, have grown weak, and are now falling away and perishing. He is climbing out of the Valley, and the darkness is less dense; but now he realizes for the first time he is alone. He is like a man standing upon the lowest level of a great mountain, and it is night. ”

“ When I was a child joyfully I ran, hand claspt in hand, now with my mother, now with my father, or with younger, blithe companions, now in sunlight, now in shadow and dread, through the strange new Valley of Life.
Sometimes on the high-road, then over the fields and meadows, or through the solemn forests; sometimes along the happy brook-side, listening to its music or the clamor of the falls, as the pleasant waters hurried or grew still, in the winding way down the Valley of Life. ”

“ In the midst of which all day
The red sun-light lazily lay.
Now each visiter shall confess
The sad valley's restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless—
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude. ”

“ But even at the bottom, in the boiling clouds of spray, there is no confusion, while the rainbow light makes all divine, adding glorious beauty and peace to glorious power. This noble fall has far the richest, as well as the most powerful, voice of all the falls of the Valley, its tones varying from the sharp hiss and rustle of the wind in the glossy leaves of the live-oak and the soft, sifting, hushing tones of the pines, to the loudest rush and roar of storm winds and thunder among the crags of the summit peaks. ”

“ There are passages in his poems as lofty and abrupt as the precipitous walls of the Valley he adores; there are shadows, also, where the imagery is vague—as imagery should be where overshadowed; there are heights dazzling with frost and sunshine; and over all is the fathomless and alluring sky, into which he soars like that aspiring soul of song that rests not this side the Gate of Heaven. ”

“ But in the Valley someways, I had feeling of assurance that it must be; for it was plain that the telling of the book was sound in its bottom sense; as might be seen; for how should any live in the utter bleak and deadly chill of the silent upper world that lay an hundred miles up in the night, hid and lost for ever. ”

“ And in that bosom, and that refuge, are you hiding yourself until all Earth's “calamities be overpast?” The deeper you hide yourself in the clefts of the smitten Rock, the safer you are. Oh! do you ever pause and think that there is a day coming, when this Valley of Tears “and all the works that are therein, shall be burned up?” When “God shall arise in the glory of His Majesty, to shake terribly the Earth.” When every mountain peak shall be black with tempest—and the whole valley shall be a sheet of living fire! ”

“ As I came through the valley, fair and far,
As drowning men look up and see a star,
The fading shore of my lost Used-to-be;
And like an arrow in my heart I heard
The last sad notes of Hope's expiring bird,
As I came through the valley.
As I came through the valley desolate,
As I came through the valley, like a beam
Of lurid lightning I beheld a gleam
Of Love's great eyes that now were full of hate.
Dear God! Dear God! I could bear all but that;
But I fell down soul-stricken, dead, thereat,
As I came through the valley. ”

“ And the wind full of wantonness wooes like a lover
The young aspen-trees, [11]
till they tremble all over.
When the East is as warm as the light of first hopes,
And day with his banner of radiance unfurled
Shines in thro' the mountainous portal [12] that opes,
Sublime, from that Valley of bliss to the world!
But never yet by night or day,
In dew of spring or summer's ray,
Did the sweet Valley shine so gay
As now it shines--all love and light,
Visions by day and feasts by night!
A happier smile illumes each brow ”

“ If, as in this charming valley, the senses may be dissolved in joy, and the spirit would linger willingly in rapt delight, soon some hard experience, kindly sent, requires one to brace all manly energy for the rough encounter, the blast of peril, and duty's steep and craggy road. You ascend in narrowing ways, casting long, lingering looks upon the valley, whenever it opens to view between the cliffs. ”

“ But, as on we wander, hearing their bright voices, and seeing their joy upon the way,—their happy chasings here and there, their eager run to hold again our hands,—how soon, I think, shall I feel the slipping away of the clasping fingers while I fall asleep by the wayside, or climb the cloud-enveloped hills, and leave those I love to journey on down the lonely Valley of Life? ”

“ And about me a voice said, "Be mine,"
There arose from the depths of my spirit
An echo: "My heart shall be thine."
Do you ask how I live in the Valley?
I weep, and I dream, and I pray;
But my tears are as sweet as the dew-drops
That fall on the roses in May;
And my prayer, like a perfume from censer,
Ascendeth to God night and day.
In the hush of the Valley of Silence,
I dream all the songs that I sing;
And the music floats down the dim valley
Till each finds a word for a wing,
That to men, like the doves of the deluge
The message of peace they may bring.{133} ”

“ A wild and dreary sadness lay heavily on the hills; now and then still a flash of lightning; mountains as if sunk in a sea of cloud, others stretching themselves upwards like giants; wherever the veil rends, a rich landscape, green groves, black villages—all this, as it seemed, flying past the rider; valley and summit, cloister and tower, hill after hill, like dream-pictures hanging among clouds. The wild elemental powers, that sleep fettered in the soul of man, are ready at such moments to burst their bonds, and rush madly forth. ”

“ Initiated now into the gloomy secrets of a family, sharing the anguish of a Christian Niobe, sad with her sadness, my soul darkened, I saw the valley in the tone of my own thoughts. The fields were bare, the leaves of the poplars falling, the few that remained were rusty, the vine-stalks were burned, the tops of the trees were tan-colored, like the robes in which royalty once clothed itself as if to hide the purple of its power beneath the brown of grief. ”

“ There is gasping struggle, glaring failure—maniac despair. For over my Valley rolls The Shadow, a giant thing, moving with the weight of mountains. And you stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you weep; you hold up your hands to your God, you grow mad; but the Shadow moves like Time, like the sun, and the planets in the sky. It rolls over you, and it rolls on; and then you cry out no more.
It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death. ”

“ Drenched in light and colour, the Valley lay dreaming amid a peaceful loveliness that woke what seemed impossible, unrealizable, longings in my heart. I yearned towards its groves and temples, I would bathe my soul in that flood of tender light, and my body in the blue coolness of that winding river. In a thousand temples must I worship. ”

“ There were some who stirred the ruins with a solid imprecation,
While as many fled repentance for the promise of despair:
There were drinkers of wrong waters in the Valley of the Shadow,
And all the sparkling ways were dust that once had led them there.
There were some who knew the steps of Age incredibly beside them,
And his fingers upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel ”

“ Here are no heights of truth overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow, lurk in its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its mad, malign inhabitants. ”

“ How many a mystic tree hath this whirlwind of wonderment snatched by the roots, how many a soul hath it exhausted. For in this Valley the traveler is flung into confusion, albeit, in the eye of him who hath attained, such marvels are esteemed and well beloved. At every moment he beholdeth a wondrous world, a new creation, and goeth from astonishment to astonishment, and is lost in awe at the works of the Lord of Oneness. ”

“ And yet, surveying the quiet valley to-day, it seems as though there were no memory of suffering or sorrow in it at all.
We climbed the down; and there at our feet the world lay like a map, with its fields, woods, hamlets and church-towers, the great rich plain rolling to the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, one's own thoughts, the schemes of one tiny moving atom on the broad back of the hills. ”

“ More solitary grow the ways, more wild the farms and rare,
And slenderer in their rocky beds the singing brooks that go
Down-slipping to the valley stream a thousand feet below.
Above us and above us still the grim escarpments rise,
Till homeward we must turn at last, or ere the daylight dies,
And leave unscaled the summit height, the even ridge o'erhead,
Where smolder through the cedar screen the sunset embers red.
What should we see, if once we won on that top step to stand?
A wondrous valley world beyond? A far-stretched tableland? ”

“ The sun has gone down a little lower and the shadows of the mountains have lengthened until they stretch almost across the valley; the sounds of life have almost ceased; the child is asleep and the lullaby ended; the tinkling of the bells is scarcely heard; the birds have gone to their nests, and up from the valley has risen a white mist that has hidden and completely covered the last sign of life. Surely a beautiful covering for such a valley, a fitting mantle for so pure a people. ”

“ The heavy atmosphere of the valley squeezes one's soul into its case, and sits on the lid like an incubus. That blessed mountain-spirit is the only power who takes the lid off altogether, and lets the soul out of its larva-case to revel in the strange beauties of his domain without restraint! ”

“ Now the outlet of the cave yawned, and Sorrow stood still dazzled. Whatever there was that was fair on earth, whatever could be pictured of power and beauty, was all collected in that valley—luscious greenery, wealth of flowers that covered the earth or crept along the giant trees in lovely garlands, trees that no ax had ever touched, and a singing of birds like heavenly music. A deep green lake reflected all this beauty ”

“ Yes, a quiet place which must have been like this place and yet, at the same time, most wonderfully different, for no poet at all could imagine any tale of love and passion springing from the life about us here. The people of the valley seem to have died before they were born. ”

“ The truly humble spirit is, in society, to the proud and haughty, what the valley is to the mountain: if less observed, more sheltered and more blessed, valleys see the stars more brightly than the mountains that often veil their proud heads with clouds. ”

“ There was a great solemnity and grandeur in the silence and stillness of the valley below. We were above the hum and stir of life, away from mankind, from the petty aims and ambitions of the world beneath us, left alone with the grand mountains. The evening shadows, with their soft blue lights, fell on the surrounding points even as we looked, and the valley itself lay in shadow below. Immediately above and inclining down towards us were the Three Brothers, their Indian name signifying "mountains playing leap-frog," giving the truest description of their triple zigzag peaks. ”

“ When the sun is setting in the valley and the crests of those heaven-kissing hills are painted violet and purple, and the valley itself is reeking and swimming in yellow-gold light, the man-devil—whom I love more than all—and I will go out into it. ”

“ Besides, memory that merged to conscious realization was playing in lambent flames through his whole being round the form of the figure against the skyline of the Ridge.
The light of the cow-boy camp blinked through the lilac mist of the Valley. A veil impalpable as dreams hovered over the River. The boom and roll of a snow cornice falling somewhere in the Gorge behind the Holy Cross came in dull rolling muffled thunder through the spruce forests. ”

“ Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the valley. "I to the hills will lift mine eyes!" There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the low-lands seems like scaling heaven. ”

“ The outer world seems to lie far beyond the high hills that enclose and shelter the quiet valley. There is a deep silence over the scene, broken now and then by the melancholy scream of the curlew or the mournful note of the plover. ”

“ There is not in this wide world a valley so sweet,
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet,
Oh! the last ray of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart! ”

“ We ask, "Is the way difficult?" They answer, "Yes, but the sun shines on us and in the valley they know nothing of its glory. Their cry we hear and are calling back to those who are still in the valley." ”

“ In gazing on this valley from a distance one would fain believe it to be in reality, as in appearance, an idyllic garden of Arcadian innocence and happiness, and, forgetting the disillusions of maturer years, dream that all human hearts are as transparent as its atmosphere, and that all life is no less sweet and pure. ”