The sylva before the flood! Huge, aspiring, with arms reaching outward
many a rood, each monarch stood; the traveler and man of science, he
whose name now fills the world, never found, in his many rounds in
search of knowledge, even in southern climes, such offspring of earth,
air, water, and the sun; and Australia, with its wondrous herbage,
sometimes cloud-capped, stand dwarfed and small to the life with which
God, in his first joy, clothed his work. The poet, too, and writer of
the Comedies, whose soul was bitter hell, saw not in heaven, nor
beneath, nor in the orb between, a wood so vast, so majestic, and so
beautiful. Trees, the growth of many a revolving year, lay mouldering;
not prostrated by the tornado, nor driven from their seat by floods of
water and of rock, which leave their track seamed, as one might plough a
furrow in the field, but fallen through age, and draped with moss of the
liveliest green, softer to the touch than a woman’s lip. The vine crept
from limb to limb, and threw out its tendrils joyously; now hanging in
mid air, and now, a parasite, twisting about the trunk of some gnarled
oak, adding to strength its sister loveliness; while flowers, broad and
tall, with petals like masts, and of a hue more delicate than that which
opens to the garish sun, spotted the ground as stars spot the sky. The
air pressed heavy, damp, laden with aromatic odors, as to one standing
beneath the swelling arches of some old temple, raised in the middle-age
by hands whose labors Michelett has transferred to historic prose, more
lasting than the stone which was to them a religion and a worship. No
voice broke the general stillness, save the sound of distant water,
floating upon the breathings of the wood, just reaching the ear, now
heard and now lost, as a maid calling to her lover. Amid such
excellence, the excellence of a primeval age, before man and the seasons
had marred earth’s face, Erix and Zella hunted.