chalk-land

Updated: May 19, 2025

Nature can show effects the significations of which are limitless; they rise to the grandeur of the highest moral conceptions be it the heather in bloom, covered with the diamonds of the dew on which the sunlight dances; infinitude decked for the single glance that may chance to fall upon it: be it a corner of the forest hemmed in with time-worn rocks crumbling to gravel and clothed with mosses overgrown with juniper, which grasps our minds as something savage, aggressive, terrifying as the cry of the kestrel issuing from it: be it a hot and barren moor without vegetation, stony, rigid, its horizon like those of the desert, where once I gathered a sublime and solitary flower, the anemone pulsatilla, with its violet petals opening for the golden stamens; affecting image of my pure idol alone in her valley: be it great sheets of water, where nature casts those spots of greenery, a species of transition between the plant and animal, where life makes haste to come in flowers and insects, floating there like worlds in ether: be it a cottage with its garden of cabbages, its vineyards, its hedges overhanging a bog, surrounded by a few sparse fields of rye; true image of many humble existences: be it a forest path like some cathedral nave, where the trees are columns and their branches arch the roof, at the far end of which a light breaks through, mingled with shadows or tinted with sunset reds athwart the leaves which gleam like the colored windows of a chancel: then, leaving these woods so cool and branchy, behold a chalk-land lying fallow, where among the warm and cavernous mosses adders glide to their lairs, or lift their proud slim heads.

Honoré de Balzac - The Lily of the Valley