Description
The Pathfinder – The Inland Sea
CHAPTER I.
The turf shall be my fragrant shrine;
My temple, Lord! that arch of thine;
My censer’s breath the mountain airs,
And silent thoughts my only prayers.
MOORE
The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The
most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the
poet’s thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths
of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the
novice with indifference; and the mind, even in the obscurity of night,
finds a parallel to that grandeur, which seems inseparable from images
that the senses cannot compass. With feelings akin to this admiration
and awe–the offspring of sublimity–were the different characters with
which the action of this tale must open, gazing on the scene before
them. Four persons in all,–two of each sex,–they had managed to ascend
a pile of trees, that had been uptorn by a tempest, to catch a view
of the objects that surrounded them. It is still the practice of the
country to call these spots wind-rows. By letting in the light of heaven
upon the dark and damp recesses of the wood, they form a sort of oases
in the solemn obscurity of the virgin forests of America. The particular
wind-row of which we are writing lay on the brow of a gentle acclivity;
and, though small, it had opened the way for an extensive view to those
who might occupy its upper margin, a rare occurrence to the traveller
in the woods. Philosophy has not yet determined the nature of the power
that so often lays desolate spots of this description; some ascribing it
to the whirlwinds which produce waterspouts on the ocean, while others
again impute it to sudden and violent passages of streams of the
electric fluid; but the effects
Product ID: 9781776766499
Sku: 9781776766499
