me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we
descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the
three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of
exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of
Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must
have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was
not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and _believes_ in the
listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated
sooner or later. But the poet's sensibility without his voice--the
poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny
bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward
shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human
eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the
society of one's fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those in
which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the
lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and
the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no
human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my
life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it
glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
passing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the white
summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was
under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings. This
disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate
friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to be
found studying at Geneva. Yet I made _one_ such friendship; and,
singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were
the very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real
surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since