This luxuriant beauty was foiled by the solemn colonnades of the forest-trees, rising in terraces upon the mountains, and by the calm sheet of the fiord, lying below, where the torrent buried its fury and was still.

Beyond, the sea hemmed in this page of Nature, written by the greatest of poets, Chance; to whom the wild luxuriance of creation when apparently abandoned to itself is owing.
The village of Jarvis was a lost point in the landscape, in this immensity of Nature, sublime at this moment like all things else of ephemeral life which present a fleeting image of perfection; for, by a law fatal to no eyes but our own, creations which appear complete--the love of our heart and the desire of our eyes--have but one spring-tide here below.

Standing on this breast-work of rock these three persons might well suppose themselves alone in the universe.
"What beauty!" cried Wilfrid.
"Nature sings hymns," said Seraphita.

"Is not her music exquisite?
Tell me, Wilfrid, could any of the women you once knew create such a glorious retreat for herself as this?
I am conscious here of a feeling seldom inspired by the sight of cities, a longing to lie down amid this quickening verdure.

Here, with eyes to heaven and an open heart, lost in the bosom of immensity, I could hear the sighings of the flower, scarce budded, which longs for wings, or the cry of the eider grieving that it can only fly, and remember the desires of man who, issuing from all, is none the less ever longing.