Thus looking and thus feeling, Immalee shudderingly approached the entrance of that building, which, blending the ruins of nature with those of art, seemed to announce the power of desolation over both, and to intimate that the primeval rock, untouched and unmodulated by human hands, and thrown upwards perhaps by some volcanic eruption, perhaps deposited there by some meteoric discharge, and the gigantic columns of stone, whose erection had been the work of two centuries—were alike dust beneath the feet of that tremendous conqueror, whose victories alone are without noise and without resistance, and the progress of whose triumph is marked by tears instead of blood.
Immalee, as she gazed around her, felt, for the first time, terror at the aspect of nature. Formerly, she had considered all its phenomena as equally splendid or terrific. And her childish, though active imagination, seemed to consecrate alike the sunlight and the storm, to the devotion of a heart, on whose pure altar the flowers and the fires of nature flung their undivided offering.
But since she had seen the stranger, new emotions had pervaded her young heart. She learned to weep and to fear; and perhaps she saw, in the fearful aspect of the heavens, the developement of that mysterious terror, which always trembles at the bottom of the hearts of those who dare to love.
How often does nature thus become an involuntary interpreter between us and our feelings! Is the murmur of the ocean without a meaning?—Is the roll of the thunder without a voice?—Is the blasted spot on which the rage of both has been exhausted without its lesson?—Do not they all tell us some mysterious secret, which we have in vain searched our hearts for?—Do we not find in them, an answer to those questions with which we are forever importuning the mute oracle of our destiny?—Alas! how deceitful and inadequate we feel the language of man, after love and grief have made us acquainted with that of nature!—the only one, perhaps, capable of a corresponding sign for those emotions, under which all human expression faints. What a difference between “words without meaning,” and that “meaning without words,” which the sublime phenomena of nature, the rocks and the ocean, the moon and the twilight, convey to those who have “ears to hear.”
How eloquent of truth is nature in her very silence! How fertile of reflections amid her profoundest desolations! But the desolation now presented to the eyes of Immalee, was that which is calculated to cause terror, not reflection. Earth and heaven, the sea and the dry land, seemed mingling together, and about to replunge into chaos. The ocean, deserting its eternal bed, dashed its waves, whose white surf gleamed through the darkness, far into the shores of the isle. They came on like the crests of a thousand warriors, plumed and tossing in their pride, and, like them, perishing in the moment of victory. There was a fearful inversion of the natural appearance of earth and sea, as if all the barriers of nature were broken, and all her laws reversed.
The waves deserting their station, left, from time to time, the sands as dry as those of the desert; and the trees and shrubs tossed and heaved in ceaseless agitation, like the waves of a midnight storm. There was no light, but a livid grey that sickened the eye to behold, except when the bright red lightning burst out like the eye of a fiend, glancing over the work of ruin, and closing as it beheld it completed.
Amid this scene stood two beings, one whose appealing loveliness seemed to have found favour with the elements even in their wrath, and one whose fearless and obdurate eye appeared to defy them.
“Immalee,” he cried, “is this a place or an hour to talk of love!—all nature is appalled—heaven is dark—the animals have hid themselves—and the very shrubs, as they wave and shrink, seem alive with terror.”
“It is an hour to implore protection,” said the Indian, clinging to him timidly.
“Look up,” said the stranger, while his own fixed and fearless eye seemed to return flash for flash to the baffled and insulted elements; “Look up, and if you cannot resist the impulses of your heart, let me at least point out a fitter object for them. Love,” he cried, extending his arm towards the dim and troubled sky, “love the storm in its might of destruction—seek alliance with those swift and perilous travellers of the groaning air—the meteor that rends, and the thunder that shakes it! Court, for sheltering tenderness, those masses of dense and rolling cloud—the baseless mountains of heaven! Woo the kisses of the fiery lightnings, to quench themselves on your smouldering bosom! Seek all that is terrible in nature for your companions and your lover!—woo them to burn and blast you—perish in their fierce embrace, and you will be happier, far happier, than if you lived in mine! Lived!—Oh who can be mine and live! Hear me, Immalee!” he cried, while he held her hands locked in his—while his eyes, riveted on her, sent forth a light of intolerable lustre—while a new feeling of indefinite enthusiasm seemed for a moment to thrill his whole frame, and new-modulate the tone of his nature; “Hear me! If you will be mine, it must be amid a scene like this forever—amid fire and darkness—amid hatred and despair—amid—” and his voice swelling to a demoniac
