my pilgrimage, as I have traversed the monotonous plains of La Vendee,
the awful grandeur of the Alps, and the lovely yet sublime scenery of
Italy, under every aspect--in summer and in winter, in sunshine and in
storm--so have I, at times, been elated by the buoyant hopes of the
present, as well as bowed down to the dust when I looked forward to
the future. I have risen with the sun, my spirits vying with the
freshness of the dawn; but how often "has my sun of hope set without a
ray, while the dark night of dim despair shadowed only phantoms!"
Alone, and on foot, I have accomplished thousands of miles over
France, Piedmont, Savoy, Switzerland, Tyrol, Lombardy, and Italy--I
have toiled along the dusty road, beneath the noontide heat of an
Italian sun, or wandered over trackless Alpine heights through the
midnight storm--have rested on princely couches, or on the wheaten
straw of the peasant--I have joined the mazourka in palaces, or the
tarantala in the wilds of Calabria--I have revelled in the scenery of
Claude, or brooded over the lofty solitudes of Salvator Rosa and the
brigand--I have experienced the frivolity of France, the dissipation
of Florence, the profligacy of the Venetian, the degeneracy of the
Roman, and vindictiveness of the Neapolitan, the insincerity of the
impoverished noble, and the truth of honest poverty--I have wondered
in the gaudy sanctuary of the Papist, teeming with devotees, or
pondered amid the nobler simplicity of the Heathen's Temple in the
deserts of malaria.

Like the Bohemian, I had, indeed, dearly purchased this liberty! at
the cost of every tie, even of religion itself, though perhaps
unconscious of it at the time. I then enjoyed robust health, the
main-spring of scepticism. Deprived, then, of the source of true
happiness, and without any defined object in view, the career before
me was a dreary one--though for the present my spirits were buoyed up
by the excitement attendant upon novelty.

CHAPTER II.

My main guide through France was the Loire, which led me by a
meandering route of nearly five hundred miles to the neighbourhood of
Lyons.

Knowing, at that time, so little of the language of those who
surrounded me, as actually to envy the fluency of a parrot which I
heard chattering with, I suspect, the true Parisian accent, I can
scarcely account for the feeling of thorough nonchalance with which I
commenced my pilgrimage, and which ever accompanied me to its
conclusion