“Nothing?”
“Only the bright-green mossy ground, speckled by tufts of dewy clover-grass that run into the interstices of the shattered arches, and round the isolated pinnacles of the ruin.”
“Like the lawny dells of soft short grass which wind among the pine forests and precipices in the Alps of Savoy?”
“Indeed, father, your eye has a vision more serene than mine.”
“And the great wrecked arches, the shattered masses of precipitous ruin, overgrown with the younglings of the forest, and more like chasms rent by an earthquake among the mountains, than like the vestige of what was human workmanship—what are they?”
“Things awe-inspiring and wonderful.”
“Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs; such as, were the sea to overflow the earth, the mightiest monsters of the deep would change into their spacious chambers?”
“Father, your words image forth what I would have expressed, but, alas! could not.”
“I hear the rustling of leaves, and the sound of waters—but it does not rain,—like the fast drops of a fountain among woods.”
“It falls from among the heaps of ruin over our heads—it is, I suppose, the water collected in the rifts by the showers.”