stretching far off to a horizon which rests 

 on clusters of islands and marks the limits 

 of the world ; in the foreground, and sweep- 

 ing around the other points of the com- 

 pass, a landscape rich in foliage, full of 

 gentle undulations, and dotted here and 

 there with fallow fields, spreads itself like 

 another sea that has been hushed into 

 sudden immutability, and then sown, every 

 wave and swell of it, with the seeds of 

 exhaustless fertility. 



From such points of eminence as these 

 the road sometimes runs with hurried de- 

 scent, as if longing for solitude, into the 

 heart of the woodlands, and there winds 

 slowly and solemnly under the overshadow- 

 ing branches ; there are no fences here, and 

 the sharp lines of separation between road- 

 bed and forest were long ago erased in 

 that quiet usurpation of man's work, which 

 Nature never fails to make the moment she 

 is left to herself. The ancient spell of the 

 woods is unbroken in this leafy solitude, 

 and no traveller in whom imagination sur- 

 vives can hope to escape it. The deep 

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