quiet and wooing charms of location,
which seem designed expressly for the hamlet and the cottage--the
evening dance--the mid-day repose and rural banquet--and all those
numberless practices of a small and well-intentioned society, which win
the affections into limpid and living currents, touched for ever, here
and there, by the sunshine, and sheltered in their repose by overhanging
leaves and flowers, for ever fertile and for ever fresh. They may not
occasion a feeling of solemn awe, but they enkindle one of admiring
affection; and where the mountain and the bald rock would be productive
of emotions only of strength and sternness, their softer featurings of
brawling brook, bending and variegated shrubbery, wild flower, gadding
vine, and undulating hillock, mould the contemplative spirit into
gentleness and love. The scenery of the South below the mountain
regions, seldom impresses at first, but it grows upon acquaintance; and
in a little while, where once all things looked monotonous and
unattractive, we learn to discover sweet influences that ravish us from
ourselves at every step we take, into worlds and wilds, where all is
fairy-like, wooing, and unchangingly sweet.

The night, though yet without a moon, was beautifully clear and
cloudless. The stars had come out with all their brightness--a soft
zephyr played drowsily and fitfully among the tops of the shrubbery,
that lay, as it were, asleep on the circling hilltops around; while the
odors of complicated charm from a thousand floral knots, which had
caught blooms from the rainbows, and dyed themselves in their stolon
splendors, thickly studding the wild and matted grass which sustained
them, brought along with them even a stronger influence than the rest of
the scene, and might have taught a ready lesson of love to much sterner
spirits than the two, now so unhappy, who were there to take their
parting in a last embrace.

The swift motion of a galloping steed was heard, and Forrester was at
the place and hour of appointment. In mournful mood, he threw himself at
the foot of one of the hills, upon one of the tufted roots of the huge
tree which sheltered the little hollow, and resigned himself to a
somewhat bitter survey of his own condition, and of the privations and
probable straits into which his rash thoughtlessness had so unhappily
involved him. His horse, docile and well-trained, stood unfastened in
the thicket, cropping the young and tender herbage at some li