Book 4 Chapter 2 Visions of the Night

Upon the highest floor of Blair Castle there was a long and spacious apartment, like unto the gallery in Paisley Castle, where John Graham had been married to Jean Cochrane, and which to-day is the drawing-room. To this high place Claverhouse climbed from the room where he had examined the two Englishmen, and here he passed the last hours of daylight on the day before the battle of Killiecrankie. Seating himself at one of the windows, he looked out towards the west, through whose golden gates the sun had begun to enter. Beneath lay a widespreading meadow which reached to the Garry; beyond the river the ground began to rise, and in the distance were the hills covered with heather, with lakes of emerald amid the purple. There are two hours of the day when the soul of man is powerfully affected by the physical world in which we live, and in which, indeed, the things we see become transparent, like a thin veil, and through them the things which are not seen stream in upon the soul.

One is sunrise, when there is first a grayness in the east, and then the clouds begin to redden, and afterwards a joyful brightness heralds the appearing of the sun as he drives in rout the reluctant rearguard of the night. The most impressive moment is when all the high lands are bathed in soft, fresh, hopeful sunshine, but the glens are still lying in the cold and dank shadow, so that one may suddenly descend from a place of brightness, where he has been in the eye of the sun, to a land of gloom, which the sun has not yet reached. Sunrise quickens the power that has been sleeping, and calls a man in high hope to the labor of the day, for if there be darkness lingering in the glen, there is light on the lofty table-lands, and soon it will be shining everywhere, when the sun has reached his meridian. And it puts heart into a man to come over the hill and down through the hollows when the sun is rising, for though the woods be dark and chill, the traveller is sure of the inevitable victory of the light.