40 
HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
|. and tender towards me might be the hospitality of the 
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 
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. JI had seen death 
from so near a view-point—let us rather say, I had 
entered so far upon it—that nature herself, 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. 
“T was recalled to her by the flowers 
by the cares 
