Emerging from the awful woods they came to a broad prairie across which the large foot-steps were deeply visible. On every side, as far as the eye could reach, the ample plain was desert and unoccupied. The innumerable herds of bison which had once been its tenantry had now, before the terror of Behemoth, fled away, and the wild wolf, which once lurked amid the rank grass, skulked from a Power which seemed to overshadow the earth. Still there was a province of animated nature into which the alarm scarcely ascended: for on high, as in the quiet and fearless hours of earlier times, the brown vulture and the bald eagle flew, silently sailing on, or sending through the air their shrill notes of ecstacy and rapture. The boundlessness of those mighty meadows was in itself calculated to strike an awe through the bosom of the advancing army; before it they lay — the Map of the Infinite: a vast table on which, as on the tables of stone the fingers of an omnipotent had written Majesty, Power and Eternity. Contemplations like these were sufficient in themselves to fill the mind of the armed host with feelings of awe and humility, but when, over the immense prairie, they saw evidences that something had passed which for the moment rivalled Deity; more palpable in its manifestations, nearer in its visible strength and less merciful in its might  when the tracks about them and the desert solitude which Behemoth had created became thus clearly, apparent, they shrunk within themselves and doubted the wisdom of their present enterprise.

Part First, pages 49-51