hat such a being could have ceased to exist. There was so
much of immortality in his thoughts and feelings, that it happens to
me a hundred times, whenever I feel emotions that elevate me above
myself, I believe I still hear him.

During my melancholy journey from Weimar to Coppet, I could not help
envying the existence of every object that circulated in nature,
even the birds and insects which were flying round me; I asked only
a day, a single day, to talk to him once more, to excite his
compassion; I envied those forest trees whose existence is
prolonged for centuries; but the inexorable silence of the grave has
something in it which confounds the human intellect; and although it
is the truth of all others the best known to us, the strength of the
impression it leaves can never be effaced. As I approached my
father's residence, one of my friends pointed out to me on the
mountain some clouds which bore the resemblance of an immense human
figure, which would disappear towards the evening: it seemed to me
that the heavens thus offered me the symbol of the loss I had just
sustained. He was a man truly great: a man, who in no circumstances
of his life ever preferred the most important of his interests to
the least of his duties;--a man, whose virtues were inspired to that
degree by his goodness, that he could have dispensed with
principles, and whose principles were so strict that he might have
dispensed with goodness.

On my arrival at Coppet, I learned that my father, during the
illness of nine days which had deprived me of him, had been
continually and anxiously occupying himself about my fate. He
reproached himself for his last book, as the cause of my exile; and
with a trembling hand, he wrote, during his fever, a letter to the
first consul, in which he assured him that I had nothing whatever to
do with the publication of his last work, but that on the contrary,
I had desired that it should not be printed. This voice of a dying
man had so much solemnity! this last prayer of a man who had played
so important a part in France, asking as an only favor, the return
of his children to the place of their birth, and an act of oblivion
to the imprudences which a daughter, then young, might have
committed,--all this appeared to me irresistible: and well as I
ought to have known the character of the man, that happened to me,
which I believe is in the nature of all who ardently desire the
cessation of a great affliction:--I ho