My step was now checked in solemn admiration. I saw the earliest products of the earth—the patriarchs of the vegetable world. The first generation of the reviving globe had sat beneath these green and lovely arches; the final generation was to sit beneath them. No roof so noble ever rose above the heads of monarchs, tho it were covered with gold and diamonds! The forest had been greatly impaired in its extent and beauty by the sacrilegious hand of war. The perpetual conflicts of the Syrian and Egyptian dynasties had laid the ax to it with remorseless violation. It once spread over the whole range of the mountains; its diminished strength now, like the relics of a mighty army, made its stand among the central fortresses of its native region; and there majestically bade defiance to the further assault of steel and fire. The forms of the trees seemed made for duration; the trunks were of prodigious thickness, smooth and round as pillars of marble; some rising to a great height, and throwing out a vast level roof of foliage; some dividing into a cluster of trunks, and with their various heights of branch and leaf making a succession of verdurous caves; some propagating themselves by circles of young cedars, risen where the fruit had dropped upon the ground; the whole bearing the aspect of a colossal temple of nature—the shafted column, the deep arch, the solid buttresses, branching off into the richest caprices of Oriental architecture, the solemn roof, high above, pale, yet painted by the strong sunlight through the leaves with transparent and tesselated dyes, various as the colors of the Indian loom. In the momentary feeling of awe and of wonder, I could comprehend why paganism loved to worship under the shade of forests and why the poets of paganism filled that shade with the presence of deities. The airy whisperings, the deep loneliness, the rich twilight, were the very food of mystery. Even the forms that towered before the eye, those ancient trees, the survivors of the general law of mortality, gigantic, hoary, covered with their weedy robes, bowing their aged heads in the blast, and uttering strange sounds and groanings in the struggle, gave to the high-wrought superstition of the time the images of things unearthly; the oracle, and the God! Or, was this impression but the obscure revival of one of those lovely truths that shone upon the days of Paradise when man drew knowledge from its fount in nature, and all but his own passions were disclosed to the first-born of creation?