- end_line
- 15313
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 15270
- text
- North Wind, championing the unquenchable quarrel of the Winter, had
wrested from the forests, and dismembered them on their own chosen
battle-ground, in barbarous disdain. 'Mid this spectacle of wide and
wanton spoil, insular noises of falling rocks would boomingly explode
upon the silence and fright all the echoes, which ran shrieking in and
out among the caves, as wailing women and children in some assaulted
town.
Stark desolation; ruin, merciless and ceaseless; chills and gloom,--all
here lived a hidden life, curtained by that cunning purpleness, which,
from the piazza of the manor house, so beautifully invested the mountain
once called Delectable, but now styled Titanic.
Beaten off by such undreamed-of glooms and steeps, you now sadly
retraced your steps, and, mayhap, went skirting the inferior sideway
terraces of pastures; where the multiple and most sterile inodorous
immortalness of the small, white flower furnished no aliment for the
mild cow's meditative cud. But here and there you still might smell from
far the sweet aromaticness of clumps of catnip, that dear farm-house
herb. Soon you would see the modest verdure of the plant itself; and
wheresoever you saw that sight, old foundation stones and rotting
timbers of log-houses long extinct would also meet your eye; their
desolation illy hid by the green solicitudes of the unemigrating herb.
Most fitly named the catnip; since, like the unrunagate cat, though all
that's human forsake the place, that plant will long abide, long bask
and bloom on the abandoned hearth. Illy hid; for every spring the
amaranthine and celestial flower gained on the mortal household herb;
for every autumn the catnip died, but never an autumn made the amaranth
to wane. The catnip and the amaranth!--man's earthly household peace,
and the ever-encroaching appetite for God.
No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt, but took your
way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic height. In mid field
again you paused among the recumbent sphinx-like shapes thrown off from
the rocky steep. You paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of
awfulness. You saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the
giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth;--turbaned with upborn
moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his whole
striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at him;--turbaned
with upborn moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front
toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him, and which,
when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him,
and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl.
- title
- Chunk 3