delicious
reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it,
restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear
without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind
which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious
of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing
actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our
most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart
can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."'

One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!'

However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had
such moments--moments free from all earthly passion--on the lake and
on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and
later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe
refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution.

The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany,
of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the
world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating sense
that he was part of a great system in which individual detail
disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole.

'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less
thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving
the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows,
fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my
imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note
them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become
at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only
studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her.

'The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in
the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study
them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge
... while plants grow under our very feet--lie, so to speak, in our
very hands.'

He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when
he was pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one
never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket
close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was
quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the
discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far
off. His first feelin