d the evening with him. I bowed respectfully, and as he noted my
swollen eyes, he returned my salute with an air of mournful sympathy.

The next day I returned to the tower. Raphael had died during the
night, and the village bell was already tolling for his burial. Women
and children were standing at their doors, looking mournfully in the
direction of the tower, and in the little green field adjoining the
church, two men, with spades and mattock, were digging a grave at the
foot of a cross.

I drew near to the door. A cloud of twittering swallows were fluttering
round the open windows, darting in and out, as though the spoiler had
robbed their nests.

Since then I have read these pages, and now know why he loved to be
surrounded by these birds, and what memories they waked in him, even to
his dying day.

RAPHAEL

I.

There are places and climates, seasons and hours, with their outward
circumstance, so much in harmony with certain impressions of the heart,
that Nature and the soul of man appear to be parts of one vast whole;
and if we separate the stage from the drama, or the drama from the
stage, the whole scene fades, and the feeling vanishes. If we take from
Rene the cliffs of Brittany, or the wild savannahs from Atala, the
mists of Swabia from Werther, or the sunny waves and scorched-up hills
from Paul and Virginia, we can neither understand Chateaubriand,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, or Goethe. Places and events are closely
linked, for Nature is the same in the eye as in the heart of man. We
are earth's children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that
the earth, our mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and
aspect, in melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us. One
cannot thoroughly enter into certain feelings, save in the spot where
they first had birth.

II.

At the entrance of Savoy, that natural labyrinth of deep valleys, which
descend like so many torrents from the Simplon, St. Bernard, and Mount
Cenis, and direct their course towards France and Switzerland, one
wider valley separates at Chambery from the Alpine chain, and, striking
off towards Geneva and Annecy, displays its verdant bed, intersected
with lakes and rivers, between the Mont du Chat and the almost mural
mountains of Beauges.

On the left, the Mont du Chat, like a gigantic rampart, runs in one
uninterrupted ridge for the space of two leagues, marking the horizon
with a dark and scarcel