come with us into the large woody desert:  we have a regular trodden way to travel, the air is clear, here is summer’s warmth and the fragrance of birch and lime.  It is an up and down hill road, always bending, and so, ever changing, but yet always forest scenery—­the close, thick forest.  We pass small lakes, which lie so still and deep, as if they concealed night and sleep under their dark, glassy surfaces.

We are now on a forest plain, where only charred stumps of trees are to be seen:  this long tract is black, burnt, and deserted—­not a bird flies over it.  Tall, hanging birches now greet us again; a squirrel springs playfully across the road, and up into the tree; we cast our eye searchingly over the wood-grown mountain-side, which slopes so far, far forward; but not a trace of a house is to be seen:  nowhere does that blueish smoke-cloud rise, that shows us, here are fellow-men.

The sun shines warm; the flies dance around the horses, settle on them, fly off again, and dance, as though it were to qualify themselves for resting and being still.  They perhaps think:  “Nothing is going on without us:  there is no life while we are doing nothing.”  They think, as many persons think, and do not remember that Time’s horses always fly onward with us!

How solitary it is here!—­so delightfully solitary! one is so entirely alone with God and one’s self.  As the sunlight streams forth over the earth, and over the extensive solitary forests, so does God’s spirit stream over and into mankind; ideas and thoughts unfold themselves—­endless, inexhaustible, as he is—­as the magnet which apportions its powers to the steel, and itself loses nothing thereby.  As our journey through the forest-scenery here along the extended solitary road, so, travelling on the great high-road of thought, ideas pass through our head.  Strange, rich caravans pass by from the works of poets, from the home of memory, strange and novel—­for capricious fancy gives birth to them at the moment.  There comes a procession of pious children with waving flags and joyous songs; there come dancing Moenades, the blood’s wild Bacchantes.  The sun pours down hot in the open forest:  it is as if the Southern summer had laid itself up here to rest in Scandinavian forest-solitude, and sought itself out a glade where it might lie in the sun’s hot beams and sleep:  hence this stillness, as if it were night.  Not a bird is heard to twitter, not a pine-tree moves:  of what does the Southern summer dream here in the North, amongst pines and fragrant birches?

In the writings of the olden time, from the classic soil of the South, are sagas of mighty fairies who, in the skins of swans, flew towards the North, to the Hyperborean’s land, to the east of the north wind; up there, in the deep, still lakes, they bathed themselves, and acquired a renewed form.  We are in the forest by these deep lakes; we see swans in flocks fly over us, and swim upon the rapid elv and on the still waters.  The forests, we perceive, continue to extend further towards the west and the north, and are more dense as we proceed:  the carriage-roads cease, and one can only pursue one’s way along the outskirts by the solitary path, and on horseback.