ich might have appeared desolate by day, were so
distanced, softened, and obscured, by the atmosphere of night, that
they presented no harsh contrast to the prevailing smoothness and
luxuriance of the landscape around. 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. She must have refined the void air of the earth when she entered
it, with a breath of the fragrant breezes, and gleam of the truant
sunshine of her lost Paradise! They must have strengthened and
brightened, and must now be strengthening and brightening with the slow
lapse of mortal years, until, in the time when earth itself will be an
Eden, they shall be made one again with the hidden world of perfection,
from which they are yet separated. So that, even now, as I look forth
over the landscape, the light that I behold has in it a glow of
Paradise, and this flower that I gat