I am reading Pilgrim's Way again. I have never read a book that has produced in me, every time I read it, the same feeling of "peace," inner peace. It is a "calming" work. That's the best way I can describe it. I look at it on the shelf, just looking at, and I feel a calming peace. Buchan loved life, he loved his life, and he looks back on his life ( The subtitle is "An Essay in Recollection" and it was published posthumously.) in Pilgrim's Way and the joy he took from his love comes through. Two other works produced the same feeling in me: Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, the biographical sections, and the short essay "Night Vigil" by Shen Zhou.http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2016/09/he-rejoiced-to-see-land-egypt-where-he.html

I am reading Pilgrim's Way again. 

"Two pictures I have always carried to cheer me in dismal places. One is of a baking noon on the high veld, the sky a merciless blue, the brown earth shimmering in a heat haze. I am looking into a wide hollow where a red road like a scar descends and disappears over the next ridge. In the bottom there is a white farm with a clump of gum trees, a blue dam, and blue water-furrows threading a patch of bright green alfalfa. An outspan fire is sending up spirals of milky blue smoke. A hawk is hovering far above, but there are no sounds except the done of insects, and very far off the jar of an ungreased axle. The air is hot but not heavy, pungent, and aromatic. I have never had such a sense of brooding primeval peace as from that sun-drenched bowl brimming with essential light." (115)

...

For Buchan it was South Africa. For me it was Cuba. Twenty years ago I visited with the Second Unfortunate Mrs. Harris. We traveled one day, I do not remember to where, and bedded down in a remote convent, clean, simply furnished, un-air-conditioned, one bedside lamp. We awoke the next morning early and I stepped out. The air was dry and had not yet acquired the baking heat of the day. The sky was big and blue.  The first sound that I heard was the primeval call of the rooster. The landscape was dry. Down below the little rise that the convent sat upon, behind some sparse vegetation, was a simple wooden shack from which issued bluish-gray smoke in a fan and the sound of hammer upon wood. The rooster and the hammer were the only sounds. I knew peace.

(This is the second time that Buchan has modified "peace" with "brooding." The first was before the outbreak of the Great War. I did not understand what he meant by peace brooding then, nor do I here.)

"There are no more comfortable words in the language than Peace and Joy, which Richard Hooker has conjoined in a famous sentence. Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positive thing; in Joy one does not only feel secure but something goes out from oneself to the universe, a warm, possessive effluence of love. There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. The world was a place of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffable, and immortal, in very truth the garment of God." (117)