nderous mass, loosened from the
cliff, to which it scarcely seemed to adhere, always threatening to fall,
fell into the flood, rebounding as it fell, and the sound was re-echoed
from rock to rock. Look where you would, all was without form, as if
nature, suddenly stopping her hand, had left chaos a retreat.

Close to the most remote side of it was the sage's abode. It was a rude
hut, formed of stumps of trees and matted twigs, to secure him from the
inclemency of the weather; only through small apertures crossed with
rushes, the wind entered in wild murmurs, modulated by these
obstructions. A clear spring broke out of the middle of the adjacent
rock, which, dropping slowly into a cavity it had hollowed, soon
overflowed, and then ran, struggling to free itself from the cumbrous
fragments, till, become a deep, silent stream, it escaped through reeds,
and roots of trees, whose blasted tops overhung and darkened the current.

One side of the hut was supported by the rock, and at midnight, when the
sage struck the inclosed part, it yawned wide, and admitted him into a
cavern in the very bowels of the earth, where never human foot before had
trod; and the various spirits, which inhabit the different regions of
nature, were here obedient to his potent word. The cavern had been formed
by the great inundation of waters, when the approach of a comet forced
them from their source; then, when the fountains of the great deep were
broken up, a stream rushed out of the centre of the earth, where the
spirits, who have lived on it, are confined to purify themselves from
the dross contracted in their first stage of existence; and it flowed in
black waves, for ever bubbling along the cave, the extent of which had
never been explored. From the sides and top, water distilled, and,
petrifying as it fell, took fantastic shapes, that soon divided it into
apartments, if so they might be called. In the foam, a wearied spirit
would sometimes rise, to catch the most distant glimpse of light, or
taste the vagrant breeze, which the yawning of the rock admitted, when
Sagestus, for that was the name of the hoary sage, entered. Some, who
were refined and almost cleared from vicious spots, he would allow to
leave, for a limited time, their dark prison-house; and, flying on the
winds across the bleak northern ocean, or rising in an exhalation till
they reached a sun-beam, they thus re-visited the haunts of men. These
were the guardian angels, who in soft