“You have called for mercy,” said her companion, in a voice that
froze her blood even under the burning atmosphere, whose air she could
scarce respire. “You have cried for mercy, and mercy you shall have. Mercy has not been dealt to me, but I have courted my horrible destiny,
and my reward is just and sure. Look forth, trembler--look forth,--I
command thee!” And he stamped with an air of authority and impatience
that completed the terror of the delicate and impassioned being who
shuddered in his grasp, and felt half-dead at his frown. “In obedience to his command, she removed the long tresses of her auburn
hair, which had vainly swept, in luxuriant and fruitless redundance, the
rock on which the steps of him she adored had been fixed. With that
mixture of the docility of the child, and the mild submission of woman,
she attempted to comply with his demand, but her eyes, filled with
tears, could not encounter the withering horrors of the scene before
her. She wiped those brilliant eyes with hairs that were every day
bathed in the pure and crystal lymph, and seemed, as she tried to gaze
on the desolation, like some bright and shivering spirit, who, for its
further purification, or perhaps for the enlargement of the knowledge
necessary for its destination, is compelled to witness some evidence of
the Almighty’s wrath, unintelligible in its first operations, but
doubtless salutary in its final results. “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 sun-light 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 for ever 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, rivetted 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!