The Mysteries of Udolpho

STORIED SONNET

The weary traveller, who, all night long,

Has climb'd among the Alps' tremendous steeps,

Skirting the pathless precipice, where throng

Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps

If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees

The mountain-shepherd's solitary home,

Peeping from forth the moon-illumin'd trees,

What sudden transports to his bosom come!

But, if between some hideous chasm yawn,

Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays,

In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn

He stands, and views in the faint rays

Far, far below, the torrent's rising surge,

And listens to the wild impetuous roar;

Still eyes the depth, still shudders on the verge,

Fears to return, nor dares to venture o'er.

Desperate, at length the tottering plank he tries,

His weak steps slide, he shrieks, he sinks--he dies!

Emily, often as she travelled among the clouds, watched in silent awe

their billowy surges rolling below; sometimes, wholly closing upon the

scene, they appeared like a world of chaos, and, at others, spreading

thinly, they opened and admitted partial catches of the landscape--the

torrent, whose astounding roar had never failed, tumbling down the rocky

chasm, huge cliffs white with snow, or the dark summits of the pine

forests, that stretched mid-way down the mountains. But who may describe

her rapture, when, having passed through a sea of vapour, she caught

a first view of Italy; when, from the ridge of one of those tremendous

precipices that hang upon Mount Cenis and guard the entrance of that

enchanting country, she looked down through the lower clouds, and, as

they floated away, saw the grassy vales of Piedmont at her feet, and,

beyond, the plains of Lombardy extending to the farthest distance, at

which appeared, on the faint horizon, the doubtful towers of Turin?

The solitary grandeur of the objects that immediately surrounded her,

the mountain-region towering above, the deep precipices that fell

beneath, the waving blackness of the forests of pine and oak, which

skirted their feet, or hung within their recesses, the headlong torrents

that, dashing among their cliffs, sometimes appeared like a cloud of

mist, at others like a sheet of ice--these were features which received

a higher character of sublimity from the reposing beauty of the Italian

landscape below, stretching to the wide horizon, where the same melting

blue tint seemed to unite earth and sky.

Madame Montoni only shuddered as she looked down precipices near whose

edge the chairmen trotted lightly and swiftly, almost, as the chamois

bounded, and from which Emily too recoiled; but with her fears were

mingled such various emotions of delight, such admiration, astonishment,

and awe, as she had never experienced before.