"I have already said that, on gaining the summit of the
rock, I found myself in a sort of oasis of the mountains.
It was so. Belted on every hand by bold and precipitous
crags, that seemed to defy the approach even of the
wildest animals, and putting utterly at fault the
penetration and curiosity of man, was spread a carpet of
verdure, a luxuriance of vegetation, that might have put
to shame the fertility of the soft breeze-nourished
valleys of Italy and Southern France. Time, however, is
not given me to dwell on the mingled beauty and wildness
of a scene, so consonant with my ideas of the romantic
and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although
my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who
was the presiding deity of the whole,--the being after
whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should
have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild
solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so
largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she
had, for a series of years, so rigidly claimed.
"At about twenty yards from the aperture, and on a bank,
formed of turf, covered with moss, and interspersed with
roses and honeysuckles, sat this divinity of the oasis.
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