“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.