They skirt the wood, and narrowly inspect the dewy grass, to find new foot-prints of beast or heavy bird, seeking, with returning light, their accustomed food. No fairy ring, no shape of naiad or of dryad, no gnome, no sprite, met their pure vision, to turn them from their way; for not yet had the mind of man built up a superstition unto itself, and peopled the clefts of the earth, the water, and the air, giving to nothingness forms innumerable. Truth was too near and palpable, to be lost in imagination; to be moulded and cast anew, so changed as not to know itself; and poetry, the juggler and soul’s cheat, lay hid in matter, where God placed it, to be drawn thence for other purposes than those of error. It was not until man forgot his origin, that he sought out a new creator, even Beauty, the prime element in all God’s works, and so wrought with it, as to give strange life to all that is, and is not. The wily hunters, skilled in their life’s trade, turn on every side, observe the lower boughs, fresh cropped, imitate the call of birds, the cry of deer, peer through the thick underwood which stood here and there in clumps, and plunged into the forest upon a trail which promised success. SECTION V. The sylva before the flood! Huge, aspiring, with arms reaching outward many a rood, each monarch stood; the traveler and man of science, he whose name now fills the world, never found, in his many rounds in search of knowledge, even in southern climes, such offspring of earth, air, water, and the sun; and Australia, with its wondrous herbage, sometimes cloud-capped, stand dwarfed and small to the life with which God, in his first joy, clothed his work. The poet, too, and writer of the Comedies, whose soul was bitter hell, saw not in heaven, nor beneath, nor in the orb between, a wood so vast, so majestic, and so beautiful. Trees, the growth of many a revolving year, lay mouldering; not prostrated by the tornado, nor driven from their seat by floods of water and of rock, which leave their track seamed, as one might plough a furrow in the field, but fallen through age, and draped with moss of the liveliest green, softer to the touch than a woman’s lip. The vine crept from limb to limb, and threw out its tendrils joyously; now hanging in mid air, and now, a parasite, twisting about the trunk of some gnarled oak, adding to strength its sister loveliness; while flowers, broad and tall, with petals like masts, and of a hue more delicate than that which opens to the garish sun, spotted the ground as stars spot the sky. The air pressed heavy, damp, laden with aromatic odors, as to one standing beneath the swelling arches of some old temple, raised in the middle-age by hands whose labors Michelett has transferred to historic prose, more lasting than the stone which was to them a religion and a worship. No voice broke the general stillness, save the sound of distant water,