Evening's crimson light sparkled in the valley's ravines and brooks, which flow on towards the sea; upon the tops of the oaks and beeches, above the steep, jagged cliffs; in the luxuriant vallies; upon the bare heights and above the glimpses of the swelling ocean which the eye discovers either between groups of trees towering up on nigh, or away over the sand-hills. This melancholy light, which encourages the mind's return to the past, to half-forgotten scenes, did not harmonise with the wanderer's mood; a fresh, sparkling, dewy morning, with a cool breeze from the coast of the enterprise-loving Scandinavians, or the islands of the old Vikings, would have satisfied it better. Blanden wished to break with his past, even drive away all the thoughts that reminded him of it; his Eva, whom he had found by the woodland stream, should be to him as the first woman of creation, whom he meets, to whom yields his undesecrated feelings. This love should be to him as a draught from a fresh spring, refreshing, cooling, and at the same time metamorphosing him as if by mysterious magic. Was it, then, love? It was in the first instance only a brief meeting; but it dropped the seed of love into his heart, and it was his will to nourish and cultivate that seed. As he walked along, lost in such thoughts, the rays of the evening sun disappeared suddenly beneath heavy clouds, through which at first it peeped like a flaming triumphal arch, until the increasing shades of night enveloped the extinguished glow. At the same time a storm arose, which burst in the wooded defiles with furious rapidity, so that the cracking of broken boughs under foot denoted his path, while the thunder of the sea became louder and more portentous, and the thousand crests of waves rose higher towards the heavy, lowering clouds. Soon the thunder of the sky amalgamated with the thunder of the billows; lightning glided down the sharp, rugged hills along the coast, so that their singular profiles gleamed like demons' faces. The lonely "Palven" bushes shivered in the tempest, and the whole heath seemed to be in ghost-like motion. Blanden felt himself refreshed by this magnificent spectacle of Nature; he thought of the proud grandeur and immutability of the universe. Just so did the storm sweep over the verdure of the heath, waving to and fro, just so did the sea cast its foaming surf against the cliffs when the ancient Prussians still lived here, who in the grove of Romove, sacrificed to their god Perkunos; when the knights of orders, their cloaks above their armour, and the black cross upon their white mantles, rode upon their steeds along the coast, when the Holy Virgin and the old heathen deity stood opposed in irreconcilable conflict. Then the din of battle raged above the Baltic shore, as to-day the din of the unfettered elements; yet, how everything had been changed!