by remorse, sleeping close to him the calm
sleep of the innocent. These virtues are as much above the virtues of
conventional life as the soul of tho man in his natural state is above
that of the man in society.

It was moonlight. Feverish with thinking, I got up and seated myself
at a little distance on a root which ran along the edge of the
streamlet: it was one of those American nights which the pencil of man
can never represent, and the remembrance of which I have a hundred
times recalled with delight.

The moon was at the highest point of the heavens; here and there at
wide, clear intervals twinkled a thousand stars. Sometimes the moon
rested on a group of clouds which looked like the summit of high
mountains crowned with snow: little by little these clouds grew
longer, and rolled out into transparent and waving zones of white
satin, or transformed themselves into light flakes of froth, into
innumerable wandering flocks in the blue plains of the firmament.
Another time the arch of heaven seemed changed into a shore on which
one could discover horizontal rows, parallel lines such as are made by
the regular ebb and flow of the sea; a gust of wind tore this veil
again, and everywhere appeared in the sky great banks of dazzlingly
white down, so soft to the eye that one seemed to feel their softness
and elasticity. The scene on the earth was not less delightful: the
silvery and velvety light of the moon floated silently over the top of
the forests, and at intervals went down among the trees, casting rays
of light even through the deepest shadows. The narrow brook which
flowed at my feet, burying itself from time to time among the thickets
of oak-, willow-, and sugar-trees, and reappearing a little farther
off in the glades, all sparkling with the constellations of the night,
seemed like a ribbon of azure silk spotted with diamond stars and
striped with black bands. On the other side of the river, in a wide,
natural meadow, the moonlight rested quietly on the pastures, where it
was spread out like a sheet. Some birch-trees scattered here and there
over the savannas, sometimes blending, according to the caprice of the
winds, with the background, seemed to surround themselves with a pale
gauze--sometimes rising up again from their chalky foundations, hidden
in the darkness, formed, as it were, islands of floating shadows on an
immovable sea of light. Near all was silence and repose, except the
falling of the leaves, the