Havelaar’s hearers he really looked about and asked for the inhabitants of Lebak that had gone. He invented nothing; he heard the tree speak, and only thought that he repeated what he imagined to have heard so distinctly in his poetical inspiration.
Should any one, perhaps, be inclined to make the observation, that the originality of Havelaar’s manner of speaking is not so indisputable, as his language makes you think of the style of the prophets of the Old Testament, I must remind him of what I said before, that in moments of ecstasy he was indeed something of a seer, and that he, fed by the impressions communicated to him by living in forests and on mountains, and by the poesy-breathing atmosphere of the East, would probably not have spoken otherwise, even if he had never read the sublime poems of the Old Testament.
Do we not find, in the verses written by him in early youth, lines like the following, which were composed on the Salak—one of the highest summits of the Preangan Regencies,—in the exordium of which he displays the softness of his emotions, and then suddenly passes to the description of the thunder which he hears below him:—
Prayer sounds more beautiful among the hills
Than in the plains. Upon the mountain top
The heart is nearer to its God, who makes
