The Mysteries of Udolpho

With what emotions of sublimity, softened by tenderness, did she meet

Valancourt in thought, at the customary hour of sun-set, when, wandering

among the Alps, she watched the glorious orb sink amid their summits,

his last tints die away on their snowy points, and a solemn obscurity

steal over the scene! And when the last gleam had faded, she turned

her eyes from the west with somewhat of the melancholy regret that is

experienced after the departure of a beloved friend; while these lonely

feelings were heightened by the spreading gloom, and by the low sounds,

heard only when darkness confines attention, which make the general

stillness more impressive--leaves shook by the air, the last sigh of the

breeze that lingers after sun-set, or the murmur of distant streams.

During the first days of this journey among the Alps, the scenery

exhibited a wonderful mixture of solitude and inhabitation, of

cultivation and barrenness. On the edge of tremendous precipices, and

within the hollow of the cliffs, below which the clouds often floated,

were seen villages, spires, and convent towers; while green pastures

and vineyards spread their hues at the feet of perpendicular rocks

of marble, or of granite, whose points, tufted with alpine shrubs, or

exhibiting only massy crags, rose above each other, till they terminated

in the snow-topt mountain, whence the torrent fell, that thundered along

the valley. The snow was not yet melted on the summit of Mount Cenis, over which

the travellers passed; but Emily, as she looked upon its clear lake and

extended plain, surrounded by broken cliffs, saw, in imagination, the

verdant beauty it would exhibit when the snows should be gone, and the

shepherds, leading up the midsummer flocks from Piedmont, to pasture on

its flowery summit, should add Arcadian figures to Arcadian landscape.

As she descended on the Italian side, the precipices became still more

tremendous, and the prospects still more wild and majestic, over which

the shifting lights threw all the pomp of colouring. Emily delighted to

observe the snowy tops of the mountains under the passing influence of

the day, blushing with morning, glowing with the brightness of noon, or

just tinted with the purple evening. The haunt of man could now only be

discovered by the simple hut of the shepherd and the hunter, or by the

rough pine bridge thrown across the torrent, to assist the latter in his

chase of the chamois over crags where, but for this vestige of man, it

would have been believed only the chamois or the wolf dared to venture.

As Emily gazed upon one of these perilous bridges, with the cataract

foaming beneath it, some images came to her mind, which she afterwards

combined in the following