d day. Nature is the high priest, the noblest
decorator, the holiest poet and most inspired musician of God. The
young swallows in their nests below the broken cornice, greeting their
mother with their cheerful chirping; the sighing of the breeze, which
seems to bear to the unpeopled cloisters the sound of flapping sails,
the lament of the waves, and the dying notes of the fisherman's song;
the balmy emanations which now and then are wafted through the nave;
the flowers which shed their leaves upon the tombs, the waving of the
green drapery which clothes the walls; the sonorous and reverberated
echoes of the stranger's steps upon the vaults where sleep the
dead,--are all as full of piety, holy thoughts, and unbounded
aspirations, as was the monastery in its days of sacred splendor. Man
is no longer there, with all his miserable passions contracted by the
narrow pale in which they were confined, but not extinguished; but God
is there, never so plainly seen as in the works of Nature,--God whose
unshadowed splendor seems to re-enter once more these intellectual
graves, whose vaulted roofs no longer intercept the glorious sunshine
and the light of heaven.

XV.

I was not at the time sufficiently composed to understand my own
feelings. I felt as one just relieved from a heavy burden, who breathes
freely, relaxes his contracted muscles, and walks to and fro in his
strength, as though he could devour space, and inhale all the air of
heaven. My own heart was the burden of which I had been relieved, and,
in giving it to another, I felt as if I had for the first time entered
into the fulness of life. Man is so truly born to love, that it is only
when he has the consciousness of loving fully and entirely that he
feels himself really a man. Until then he is disturbed and restless,
inconstant and wandering in his thoughts; but from thenceforward all
his waverings cease, he feels at rest, and sees his destiny before him.

I sat down upon the ivy-covered wall of a high dilapidated terrace
which overlooked the lake. My eyes wandered over the bright expanse of
water and the luminous immensity of the sky; they were so well blended
in the azure line of the horizon that it would have been impossible to
define where the sky commenced, and where the lake terminated. I seemed
to float in the pure ether, or to be merged in a universal ocean. But
the inward joy which inundated my soul was far more infinite, radiant,
and incommensurat