As Antonina beheld the brightened fields and
the shadowed woods, here mingled, there succeeding each other, stretched
far onward and onward until they joined the distant mountains, that
eloquent voice of nature, whose audience is the human heart, and whose
theme is eternal love, spoke inspiringly to her attentive senses. She
stretched out her arms as she looked with steady and enraptured gaze
upon the bright view before her, as if she longed to see its beauties
resolved into a single and living form--into a spirit human enough to be
addressed, and visible enough to be adored.
'Beautiful earth!' she murmured softly to herself, 'Thy mountains are
the watch-towers of angels, thy moonlight is the shadow of God!'
Her eyes filled with bright, happy tears; she turned to Hermanric, who
stood watching her, and continued:--
'Have you never thought that light, and air, and the perfume of flowers,
might contain some relics of the beauties of Eden that escaped with Eve,
when she wandered into the lonely world? They glowed and breathed for
her, and she lived and was beautiful in them! They were united to one
another, as the sunbeam is united to the earth that it warms; and could
the sword of the cherubim have sundered them at once? When Eve went
forth, did the closed gates shut back in the empty Paradise, all the
beauty that had clung, and grown, and shone round her? Did no ray of
her native light steal forth after her into the desolateness of the
world? Did no print of her lost flowers remain on the bosom they must
once have pressed? It cannot be! A part of her possessions of Eden
must have been spared to her with a part of her life.
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