mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where
the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her
heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In
scenes like these she would often linger along, wrapt in a melancholy
charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the
lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog,
were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then, the gloom
of the woods; the trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the
breeze; the bat, flitting on the twilight; the cottage-lights, now
seen, and now lost--were circumstances that awakened her mind into
effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry.

Her favourite walk was to a little fishing-house, belonging to St.
Aubert, in a woody glen, on the margin of a rivulet that descended
from the Pyrenees, and, after foaming among their rocks, wound its
silent way beneath the shades it reflected. Above the woods, that
screened this glen, rose the lofty summits of the Pyrenees, which
often burst boldly on the eye through the glades below. Sometimes
the shattered face of a rock only was seen, crowned with wild shrubs;
or a shepherd's cabin seated on a cliff, overshadowed by dark
cypress, or waving ash. Emerging from the deep recesses of the
woods, the glade opened to the distant landscape, where the rich
pastures and vine-covered slopes of Gascony gradually declined to the
plains; and there, on the winding shores of the Garonne, groves, and
hamlets, and villas--their outlines softened by distance, melted from
the eye into one rich harmonious tint.

This, too, was the favourite retreat of St. Aubert, to which he
frequently withdrew from the fervour of noon, with his wife, his
daughter, and his books; or came at the sweet evening hour to welcome