present age,
and cause the next to spring with renovated youth."--(_Voyages
en Orient_, I. 49-60.[46])

One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and
profoundly religious impressions of his mind:--

"I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and
immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I
repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy
from my mother: the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which
I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the
evening in the garden of Melly. I experienced a melancholy
pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to
the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real
movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The
prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and
who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer
a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most
eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that
whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the
Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I
prayed, in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea;
also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to
accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the
moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on
board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white
hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets."--(I. 57.)

A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his
descriptive powers.

"It was night--that is, what they call night in those climates;
but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of
the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full
noon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our
vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance
from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens,
had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had
besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep
blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon,
at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of
which the one had headlands pointed and coloured like the
Coliseum at