I came out presently on
the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly
from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine
boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it
was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off
their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows
of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall
of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the
green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam
globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a
scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own
secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden
blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in
order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to
imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New
Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its
music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the
boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had
been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory
of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from
things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing.
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