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Rh redeemed from the common-place by stamping them with the character of fate!

Arden departed early the next morning. He took no farewell, and left no words of blessing behind him. Some slight noise had awakened Francesca, and opening her casement, she looked through the thick and misty air, and saw him riding slowly over the heath. It was a bleak and desolate scene. In summer it was a wide and beautiful panorama; but now the dreariest hours of the year were paramount, and nature looked rather lifeless than sleeping. The common was brown, and the trees leafless; while a dull and leaden sky oppressed, rather than surrounded, the landscape.

Never tell me of the sterner beauties of winter. Winter may have a mighty beauty of its own, where the mountain rises, white with the snow of a thousand years, hemmed in by black pine forests, eternal in their gloom; where the overhanging avalanche makes terrible even the slightest sound of the human voice; where the pinnacles of ice catch the sunbeams but to mock their power, and wear the genial and rosy tiny of that warmth which they know not; and where waters that never flowed spread the glittering valleys with the frost-work of the measureless past.