“I was ever weeping in the depths of my soul for the sin that I had committed; but when I tried to pray to God for mercy, I could find no adequate words to utter my repentance, until one day my eyes chanced to fall upon a holy book. I opened that book and on one of its pages I met with a giant cry of true contrition, a psalm of David, commencing: _Miserere mei, Domine!_ From the instant in which I read those verses my one thought has been to find a musical expression so magnificent, so sublime, that it would suffice as a setting for the Royal Psalmist’s mighty hymn of anguish. As yet I have not found it; but if I ever attain to the point of expressing what I feel in my heart, what I hear confusedly in my brain, I am sure of writing a _Miserere_ so marvellous in beauty that the sons of men will have heard no other like unto it, so desperate in grief that, as its first strains rise to heaven, the archangels, their eyes flooded with tears, will with me cry out unto the Lord, beseeching _Mercy_; and the Lord will be merciful to his unhappy creature.”
The pilgrim, on reaching this point in his narrative, paused for an instant, and then, heaving a sigh, took up again the thread of his story. The lay-brother, a few dependents of the abbey, and two or three shepherds from the friars’ farm--these who formed the circle about the hearth--listened to him in the deepest silence.
“After travelling over all Germany,” he continued, “all Italy and the greater part of this country whose sacred music is classic, I have not yet heard a _Miserere_ that can give me my inspiration, not one,--not one, and I have heard so many that I may say I have heard them all.”
“All?” broke in one of the upper shepherds. “But you have not heard, have you, the _Miserere_ of the Mountain?”
“The _Miserere_ of the Mountain!” exclaimed the musician with an air of amazement. “What _Miserere_ is that?”
“Didn’t I say so?” muttered the peasant under his breath, and then went on in a mysterious tone: “This _Miserere_, which is only heard, as chance may fall, by those who, like myself, wander day and night following the sheep through the thickets and over the rocky hills, is, in fact, a tradition, a very old tradition; yet incredible as it seems, it is no less true.