“Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her.And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life.”

“The park is high. And as out of a houseI step out of its glimmering half-lightinto openness and evening. Into the wind,the same wind that the clouds feel,the bright rivers and the turning millsthat stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.Now I too am a thing held in its hand,the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:Is that one sky?: Blissfully lucid blue,into which ever purer clouds throng,and under it all white in endless changes,and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,and over everything this silent radianceof a setting sun. Miraculous structure,moved within itself and upheld by itself,shaping figures, giant wings, faultsand high mountain ridges before the first starand suddenly, there: a gate into suchdistances as perhaps only birds know...”

“I am wild, I will sing to the trees,I will sing to the stars in the sky,I love, I am loved, he is mine,Now at last I can die!I am sandaled with wind and with flame,I have heart-fire and singing to give,I can tread on the grass or the stars,Now at last I can live!”

“I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remotenesses of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass, — I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers.”

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.”

“Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.”