mist draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely,
charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the
epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism
is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When
the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small
universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better;
for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the
heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the
moralist."

It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what
follows, of Swiss frost:

[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees
and peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the
cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with
their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois
fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into
my face!" The weather is seldom talked of with so much real
sensitiveness to it as in this:

"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
favourable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days
as these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it
possible to live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a
song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our
life to its very centre. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is
a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which
are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and
which are so because at such times the soul, instead of being