country, as all are apt to form who have never seen any other. He dwelt on
the glories of an Abbaye des Vignerons, too, with the gusto of a Vévaisan,
and seemed to think it would be a high stroke of state policy, to get up a
new, _fête_ of this kind as speedily as possible. In short, the world and
its interests were pretty generally discussed between these two
philosophers during an intercourse that extended to a month.

Our American was not a man to let instruction of this nature easily escape
him. He lay hours at a time on the seats of Jean Descloux's boat, looking
up at the mountains, or watching some lazy sail on the lake, and
speculating on the wisdom of which he was so accidentally made the
repository. His view on one side was limited by the glacier of Mont Vélan,
a near neighbor of the celebrated col of St. Bernard; and on the other,
his eye could range to the smiling fields that surround Geneva. Within
this setting is contained one of the most magnificent pictures that Nature
ever drew, and he bethought him of the human actions, passions, and
interests of which it might have been the scene. By a connexion that was
natural enough to the situation, he imagined a fragment of life passed
between these grand limits, and the manner in which men could listen to
the never-wearied promptings of their impulses in the immediate presence
of the majesty of the Creator. He bethought him of the analogies that
exist between inanimate nature and our own wayward inequalities; of the
fearful admixture of good and evil of which we are composed; of the manner
in which the best betray their submission to the devils, and in which the
worst have gleams of that eternal principle of right, by which they have
been endowed by God; of those tempests which sometimes lie dormant in our
systems, like the slumbering lake in the calm, but which excited, equal
its fury when lashed by the winds; of the strength of prejudices; of the
worthlessness and changeable character of the most cherished of our
opinions, and of that strange, incomprehensible, and yet winning _mélange_