trees, a door opening onto an entirely unknown country which, because of the insistent straightness of the avenue drawn over hill and dale as by some wild caprice, by a will royally disdainful of all difficulties, seemed to confer a gift of supreme attraction. Amazing, too, was the indubitable exaggeration of its dimensions, leaving between the glorious walls of lofty verdure the span of a veritable clearing covered with a carpet of grass, vast and empty as the bare stage of a theatre, and whose colossal width seemed destined to reveal gradually to the soul all the, by no means ordinary, terrors of agoraphobia. And yet, in spite of the abnormal urgency suggested by the straightness of this cut—as though on a planet inhabited by mad geometers it had been considered of prime necessity to paint first of all the meridians on the ground—the character of pure direction , free from all idea of a goal, seemed in its peremptory affirmation alone sufficient—Albert and Heide turning to look back, noticed, not without a feeling of uneasiness, that the avenue only a short distance behind them, gradually invaded by the extravagant vegetation of the underbrush, little by little relinquished its geometric majesty and was lost in the impasse of the uniform ocean of trees.
Nothing can convey an idea of the suggestive power of this road , open for the soul alone in the heart of a forest isolated from the world, and which, by the disconcerting amplitude of its useless dimensions, seemed to render more complete the solitude of these sequestered regions. At this moment the sun, low in its course, shone in the very middle of the trench, which the avenue cut through the trees all the way to the distant horizon, and filled the theatrical vessel with a flood of golden light: as far as the eye could see the double colonnade of trees, more motionless than a curtain of leaves reflected in a sheet of water, seemed to make way before it; and, as on a path opened through the sea, and in the midst of a silence more sumptuous than that of an empty palace and which seemed to hold all things in suspense in the sustained flash of its enchantment, Heide and Albert started down the middle of the avenue. For a long time through the declining hours of the day, they followed the implacable rigidity of the route, colliding with the suffocating walls of their destiny.
Sometimes a bird flew like a triumphant arrow across the avenue, and its particular and now surprising immunity , during its whole passage across what seemed, even to the least initiated eye, one of the authentic high-tension lines of the globe, had an effect on the mind akin to watching the nerve-racking gymnastics of a sparrow on an electric wire. Sometimes a brook crossed the path, recognized far off by the singular gaiety, the entirely gratuitous musicality of the murmur of its transparent waters, and Albert then with a fraternal grace, would take Heide's shoes from her tired feet, improvising a scene comparable, by the excessive force of its effect upon the soul abandoned in these lonely haunts, with that scene which the critic of symphonies has designated by a completely strange title—because it suggests, and intends to suggest, that certain human relations lost in an animality as pure and fluent as thought, are completely reducible to an element for the first time envisaged from within —of "scene beside the brook".
At last night fell over the forest and the sky revealed all its stars, but nothing could stop their divine course, guarded more surely within the temple in the woods than by the tutelary sphinxes along the avenues of the Egyptian tombs. Trust , restored Albert and Heide to the state of pure virtue and resembling the milky emanation of the night bathed by the moon, visited them with all its primitive grace. As once before, on that harrowing day, across the watery plains of the sea, retreat was now no longer possible. But the night lingered and the avenue stretched out in all
Nothing can convey an idea of the suggestive power of this road , open for the soul alone in the heart of a forest isolated from the world, and which, by the disconcerting amplitude of its useless dimensions, seemed to render more complete the solitude of these sequestered regions. At this moment the sun, low in its course, shone in the very middle of the trench, which the avenue cut through the trees all the way to the distant horizon, and filled the theatrical vessel with a flood of golden light: as far as the eye could see the double colonnade of trees, more motionless than a curtain of leaves reflected in a sheet of water, seemed to make way before it; and, as on a path opened through the sea, and in the midst of a silence more sumptuous than that of an empty palace and which seemed to hold all things in suspense in the sustained flash of its enchantment, Heide and Albert started down the middle of the avenue. For a long time through the declining hours of the day, they followed the implacable rigidity of the route, colliding with the suffocating walls of their destiny.
Sometimes a bird flew like a triumphant arrow across the avenue, and its particular and now surprising immunity , during its whole passage across what seemed, even to the least initiated eye, one of the authentic high-tension lines of the globe, had an effect on the mind akin to watching the nerve-racking gymnastics of a sparrow on an electric wire. Sometimes a brook crossed the path, recognized far off by the singular gaiety, the entirely gratuitous musicality of the murmur of its transparent waters, and Albert then with a fraternal grace, would take Heide's shoes from her tired feet, improvising a scene comparable, by the excessive force of its effect upon the soul abandoned in these lonely haunts, with that scene which the critic of symphonies has designated by a completely strange title—because it suggests, and intends to suggest, that certain human relations lost in an animality as pure and fluent as thought, are completely reducible to an element for the first time envisaged from within —of "scene beside the brook".
At last night fell over the forest and the sky revealed all its stars, but nothing could stop their divine course, guarded more surely within the temple in the woods than by the tutelary sphinxes along the avenues of the Egyptian tombs. Trust , restored Albert and Heide to the state of pure virtue and resembling the milky emanation of the night bathed by the moon, visited them with all its primitive grace. As once before, on that harrowing day, across the watery plains of the sea, retreat was now no longer possible. But the night lingered and the avenue stretched out in all
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