the sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on
the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend
themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be
brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over
ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
man's life.[77]

"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I