Chapter XIII: Section V

The sylva before the flood! Huge, aspiring, with arms reaching outward many a rood, each monarch stood; the traveler and man of science, he whose name now fills the world, never found, in his many rounds in search of knowledge, even in southern climes, such offspring of earth, air, water, and the sun; and Australia, with its wondrous herbage, sometimes cloud-capped, stand dwarfed and small to the life with which God, in his first joy, clothed his work. The poet, too, and writer of the Comedies, whose soul was bitter hell, saw not in heaven, nor beneath, nor in the orb between, a wood so vast, so majestic, and so beautiful. Trees, the growth of many a revolving year, lay mouldering; not prostrated by the tornado, nor driven from their seat by floods of water and of rock, which leave their track seamed, as one might plough a furrow in the field, but fallen through age, and draped with moss of the liveliest green, softer to the touch than a woman’s lip. The vine crept from limb to limb, and threw out its tendrils joyously; now hanging in mid air, and now, a parasite, twisting about the trunk of some gnarled oak, adding to strength its sister loveliness; while flowers, broad and tall, with petals like masts, and of a hue more delicate than that which opens to the garish sun, spotted the ground as stars spot the sky. The air pressed heavy, damp, laden with aromatic odors, as to one standing beneath the swelling arches of some old temple, raised in the middle-age by hands whose labors Michelett has transferred to historic prose, more lasting than the stone which was to them a religion and a worship. No voice broke the general stillness, save the sound of distant water, floating upon the breathings of the wood, just reaching the ear, now heard and now lost, as a maid calling to her lover. Amid such excellence, the excellence of a primeval age, before man and the seasons had marred earth’s face, Erix and Zella hunted.