Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

‘‘Well, but I,’’ cried Wilfrid, with a terrible glance of murderous eagerness and desire, ‘‘l, who know what the extent of her power is over me—I will prove your mistake.”’

At this moment, when words were rushing to Wilfrid’s tongue as vehemently as ideas in his head, he saw Seraphita (H—Vol. 25p. 146 come out of the Swedish castle, followed by David. The sight of her soothed his effervescent state.

‘‘Look,’’ said he; ‘‘none but a woman can have that grace and languor.”’

‘‘He is ill; it is his last walk!’’ said Minna.

At a sign from his mistress, David left her, and she advanced toward Wilfrid and Minna.

‘‘het us go to the falls of the Sieg,’’ said the mysterious being; it was the wish of a sufferer which all hasten to accede to.

A thin, white haze hung over the heights and dales of the fiord, and the peaks, glittering like stars, pierced above it, giving it the effect of a milky way moving onward. Vhrough this earth-born vapor the sun was visible as a globe of red-hot iron. In spite of these last freaks of winter, gusts of mild air, bringing the scent of the birch trees, already covered with their yellow flowers, and the rich perfume exhaled by the larches, whose silky tufts were ail displayed—breezes warm with the incense and the breathing of the earth testified to the exquisite springtime of Northern lands, the brief rapture of a most melancholy nature.

The wind was beginning to roll away the veil of mist that hardly hid the view of the gulf. The birds were singing,

Where the sun had not dried off the frost that trickled down the road in murmuring rills, the bark of the trees was pleasing to the eye by its fantastic appearance.

They all three went along the strand in silence. Wilfrid and Minna were lost in contemplation of the magical scene after their long endurance of the monotonous winter landscape. Their companion was pensive, and walked as

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though trying to distinguish one voice in the concert. They reached the rocks between which the Sieg tumbles, at the end of the long avenue of ancient fir trees which the torrent had cut in meandering through the forest, a path covered in by a groined arch of boughs, meeting like those of a cathedral. From thence the whole of the fiord was seen, and the sea sparkled on the horizon like a steel blade. At this instant the clouds vanished, showing the blue sky. Down in the hollows and round the trees the air was full of floating sparkles, the diamond dust swept up by a light breeze, and dazzling gems of drops were hanging at the tip of the branches of each pyramid. The torrent was rolling below; a smoke came up from the surface, tinted ia the sunshine with every hue of light; its beams, decomposed, displayed perfect rainbows of the seven colors, like the play of a thousand prisms meeting and crossing there. This wild shore was curtained with various kinds of lichen, a rich web, sheeny with moisture, like some gorgeous hanging of silk. Heath, already in blossom, crowned the rocks with flowers in skilful disorder. All this stirring foliage, tempted by the living waters, hung their heads over it like hair; the larches waved their lacelike arms, as if caressing the pines that stood rigid like careworn old men.