stage, the whole scene fades, and the feeling vanishes. If we take from
René the cliffs of Brittany, or the wild savannahs from Atala, the
mists of Swabia from Werther, or the sunny waves and scorched-up hills
from Paul and Virginia, we can neither understand Chateaubriand,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, or Goethe. Places and events are closely
linked, for Nature is the same in the eye as in the heart of man. We
are earth's children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that
the earth, our mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and
aspect, in melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us. One
cannot thoroughly enter into certain feelings, save in the spot where
they first had birth.




II.


At the entrance of Savoy, that natural labyrinth of deep valleys, which
descend like so many torrents from the Simplon, St. Bernard, and Mount
Cenis, and direct their course towards France and Switzerland, one
wider valley separates at Chambéry from the Alpine chain, and, striking
off towards Geneva and Annecy, displays its verdant bed, intersected
with lakes and rivers, between the Mont du Chat and the almost mural
mountains of Beauges.

On the left, the Mont du Chat, like a gigantic rampart, runs in one
uninterrupted ridge for the space of two leagues, marking the horizon
with a dark and scarcely undulated line. A few jagged peaks of gray
rock at the eastern extremity alone break the almost geometrical