Excerpt from The Romancists, Vol. 1In the early part of September, 1832, a young man of some thirty years of age was walking rapidly and with a thoughtful air up one of the valleys that open out from the Vosges Mountains into Lorraine. This wild basin, closely confined between two parallel lines of mountains, was watered by a small stream which emptied into the Moselle, after a course of some few leagues. To the south the hills gradually spread out as they lost their elevation, and insensibly melted into the plain. Rich plantations of hemp disputed possession of the banks of the stream with fields whose abundant vegetation attested the fertility of the soil. Farther up, upon plateaus arrayed amphitheatre-wise, large tracts of cleared land, from which the crops had been gathered, encroached here and there upon the primeval forest, in other places, the centuriesold oaks and elms had been dethroned by plantations of cherry-trees, whose symmetrical files gave promise of abundant harvests of kirsch-wasser. On all sides were evidences of the struggle between human industry and nature, whose features are especially pronounced in mountainous regions.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.