40 



HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 



compelled to go to the North, to an unknown tongue 

 and a hostile sky, where the earth for half a year 

 wears mourning weeds. During these long seasons of 

 frost, my failing health extinguishing imagination, I 

 could scarcely re-create for myself my ideal South. A 

 dog might have somewhat consoled me: in default, I 

 made two little friends, who resembled, I fancied, my 

 mother's turtle-doves. They knew me, loved me, 

 sported by my fireside; I gave to them the summer 

 which my heart had not. 



"Seriously affected, I fell very ill, and thought I 

 should soon touch the other shore. However studious 

 and tender towards me might be the hospitality of the 

 stranger, it was needful I should return to France. 

 It was long before carefulness of affection, and a 

 marriage in which I found again a father's heart and 

 arms, could restore my health. I had seen death 

 from so near a view-point — let us rather saj, I had 

 entered so far upon it — that nature hereelf, living 

 nature, that first love and rapture of my young years, 

 had for a long time little hold upon me, and she alone 

 had any. Nothing had supplied her place. History, 

 and the recital of the pathetic stirring human drama, 

 moved me but lightly; nothing seized firmly on my 

 mind but the unchangeable, God and Nature. 



" Nature is immovable and yet mobile; that is her 

 eternal charm. Her unwearied activity, her ever- 

 shifting phantasmagoria, do not weary, do not disturb; 

 this harmonious motion bears in itself a profound 

 repose. 



" I was recalled to her by the flowers — by the cares 



X.h 



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