Here a path branched off to the peak of San Geronimo,--a two hours' clamber through an absolute desert of rock. My guide, although panting and sweating with his load, proposed the ascent; but in the film of heat which overspread the land I should have only had a wider panorama in which all distinct forms were lost,--vast, no doubt, but as blurred and intangible as a metaphysical treatise. I judged it better to follow the example of a pious peasant and his wife whom we had overtaken, and who, setting their faces toward the renowned monastery, murmured an _Ave_ from time to time. Erelong, on emerging from the thickets, we burst suddenly upon one of the wildest and most wonderful pictures I ever beheld. A tremendous wall of rock arose in front, crowned by colossal turrets, pyramids, clubs, pillars, and ten-pin shaped masses, which were drawn singly, or in groups of incredible distortion, against the deep blue of the sky. At the foot of the rock, the buildings of the monastery, huge and massive, the church, the houses for pilgrims, and the narrow gardens completely filled and almost overhung a horizontal shelf of the mountain, under which it again fell sheer away, down, down into misty depths, the bottom of which was hidden from sight. I dropped from the mule, sat down upon the grass, and, under pretence of sketching, studied this picture for an hour. In all the galleries of memory I could find nothing resembling it.
The descriptions of Montserrat must have made a powerful impression upon Goethe's mind, since he deliberately appropriated the scenery for the fifth act of the Second Part of Faust. Goethe was in the steadfast habit of choosing a local and actual habitation for the creations of his imagination; his landscapes were always either painted from nature, or copied from the sketch-books of others. The marvellous choruses of the fifth act floated through my mind as I drew; the "Pater Ecstaticus" hovered in the sunny air, the anchorites chanted from their caves, and the mystic voices of the undeveloped child-spirits came between, like the breathing of an Æolian harp. I suspect that the sanctity of the mountain really depends as much upon its extraordinary forms, as upon the traditions which have been gradually attached to it. These latter, however, are so strange and grotesque, that they could only be accepted here.