A kind of awe comes over the soul in traversing this region, and yet it has a certain mysterious attraction which draws us on and on, as if nature had some marvellous secret in store for us. The atmosphere is charged with a thin vapor that quivers in the blazing sun. Strange insects are in the air. A sense of the infinite, such as we feel in the midst of the ocean, comes over us. We grow breathless as the air--grow silent as the light that gilds the vast landscape before us. One of the greatest of the sons of the Landes--the Père de Ravignan--says: “Solitude is the _patrie des forts_: silence is their prayer.” One feels how true it is in these boundless moors. It is the only prayer fit for this realm of silence, where one is brought closer and closer to the heart of nature, and restored, as it were, at least in a degree, to the primeval relation of man with his Creator. Carlyle says the finest nations in the world, the English and the American, are all going away into wind and tongue. We recommend a season in the Landes, where one becomes speedily impressed that “silence is the eternal duty of man.” We wonder such a region should be inhabited. The _daunas_, we hope, never have courage enough to raise their still voices in the open air. We fancy wooing carried on in true Shaksperian style: “O Imogen! I’ll speak to thee in silence.” --“What should Cordelia do? Love and be silent.” However this may be, the Landes are peopled, though thinly. Here and there at immense distances we come to a cottage. The men are shepherds, fishermen, or _résiniers_, as the turpentine-producers are called. Pliny, Dioscorides, and other ancient writers speak of the inhabitants as collecting the yellow amber thrown up by the sea, and trafficking in beeswax, resin, and pitch. The Phœnicians and Carthaginians initiated them into the mysteries of mining and forging. The Moors taught them the value of their cork-trees. They still keep bees that feed on the purple bells of the heather, and sell vast quantities of wax for the candles used in the churches of France--_cierges_, as they are called, from _cire vierge_--virgin wax, wrought by chaste bees, and alone fit for the sacred altars of Jesus and Mary. Ausonius thus speaks of the pursuits of the people: “Mercatus ne agitas leviore numismate captans, Insanis quod mox pretiis gravis auctio vendat, Albentisque sevi globulos et pinguia ceræ Pondera, Naryciamque picem, scissamque papyrum Fumantesque olidum paganica lumina tœdas.”