Beyond, the monotonous plain of the ferns, bathed in light, stretches away as far as the eye can reach.  Their green fans expand beneath the sun which colors, but does not cause them to fade.  Upon the horizon a few scattered trees lift their slender columns.  You see now and then the silhouette of a herdsman on his stilts, inert and standing like a sick heron.  Wild horses are grazing half hid in the herbage.  As the train passes, they abruptly lift their great startled eyes and stand motionless, uneasy at the noise that has troubled their solitude.

Man does not fare well here—­he dies or degenerates; but it is the country of animals, and especially of plants.  They abound in this desert, free, certain of living.  Our pretty, cut-up valleys are but poor things alongside of these immense spaces, leagues upon leagues of marshy or dry vegetation, a level country, where nature, elsewhere troubled and tortured by men, still vegetates, as in primeval days, with a calm equal to its grandeur.  The sun needs these savannas in order properly to spread out its light; from the rising exhalation, you feel that the whole plain is fermenting under its force; and the eyes, filled by the limitless horizon, divine the secret labor by which this ocean of rank verdure renews and nourishes itself.

THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE[A]

[Footnote A:  From a letter to his mother, written from the monastery in 1739.]

BY THOMAS GRAY

We took the longest road, which lies through Savoy, on purpose to see a famous monastery, called the Grande Chartreuse, and had no reason to think our time lost.  After having traveled seven days very slow (for we did not change horses, it being impossible for a chaise to go fast in these roads), we arrived at a little village, among the mountains of Savoy, called Echelles; from thence we proceeded on horses, who are used to the way, to the mountain of the Chartreuse.

It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging overhead; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent that, sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is made still greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld.