For the fairy here has countless faces. She has the cold Alpine plants, and yet she shelters the most delicate flora. Austere in winter and spring, she terrifies you with the rugged rocks which, in autumn, she conceals under a crimson mantle of foliage. She has at her disposal, for a daily change, the delicate tissue of floating gauze which Lantara never fails to spread over it in all his pictures. With her belt of forest she arrests on every side the light mists, and gaily weaves them into veils, and scarfs, and girdles; into all kinds of delicate disguises. You would think the heavy masses of sandstone invariable; yet they change their aspects, their colours--I was going to say their form--every hour. The little chain, for example, known as the Rock of Avon, had saluted us in the morning with the breath of the heather, the cheeriest ray of the dawn, an enchanting aurora which tinted with rose hues the sandstone; all nature seemed to smile, and to harmonize with the innocent studies of a devout and poetic soul. When we returned there in the evening, the capricious fairy had changed everything. Those pines, which had welcomed us under their airy canopy, had suddenly grown wild and fierce, and resounded with strange noises, with lamentations of sinister augury. Those shrubs, which in the morning had graciously invited the white robe to pause beside them and gather their berries or flowers, now seemed to conceal in their copses an undefinable something of ill omen--robbers, it might be, or sorcerers! But greater still the transformation in those rocks, which had courteously received us, and bidden us be seated. Is it the evening, or is it a coming storm, which has changed them? I know not; but there they are, metamorphosed into gloomy sphinxes, into elephants prostrate on the earth, into mammoths, and other monsters of the old worlds which have ceased to exist. They are now at rest, it is true; but are they not about to rise? However this may be, the evening comes on apace; let us advance. My wife presses close to my arm. [Illustration] Does not our forest deserve the name of the Shakespearian comedy, "As You Like It"? No; to deal justly with it, we must own that its entertaining metamorphosis, and all its changes to the eye, are absolutely external. Movable in its leaves and mists, fugitive in its shifting sands, it has a firmer foundation than perhaps any other forest, and a power of fixity which communicates itself to the soul, and invites it to grow strong; to search out and seek within its own nature whatever it possesses of the inscrutable. Do not linger too long over its fantastic accidents. _Without_ it says, "As You Like It;" _within_, "Ever and for ever." [Illustration] Its beauty is that of the profound, faithful, and tender heart, which does not the less vary its exquisite grace, though it may daily repeat the words of Charles d'Orléans: "Who can ever weary of her? Still her beauty she renews."