with such pleasing dreams. Oh, my father! now I understand the deep
wailings in the woods and in the mountains, in the gurgling stream, the
word of the Eternal himself and his almighty compassion on us unhappy,
lost creatures, was murmured to me from every wave and from every
bough. With a million of tongues the countless foliage reproached my
negligent tardiness. My eye pierced through the past and future, my
thoughts were adoration, my feelings holy devotion.

"I plunged into the thickest woods and gave a free course to my flowing
tears, I now received the third summons and I no longer resisted it. In
the solitude of night, my whole being was absorbed in prayer and
thanksgiving, wonderously the strongest words poured forth without the
slightest exertion, as tears flow without design, as wave follows wave
down the stream, as the wind puts in motion the numberless foliage of
the forest, thus led by a higher and invisible spirit, my speech was
changed into prophecy. A new being arose within me, I no longer
recognised that of yesterday. In the mirror of my inmost soul another
eye, different from my own, met mine, nevertheless this was really
myself. Now resting, now walking, I found myself in the twilight of
morning in the district of Sauve among the recesses of the mountains.
You know, my father, the lofty situation of the dreary landscape there,
no tree, no shrub, scarcely a solitary blade of grass upon the barren,
white chalky waste, and as far as the eye extends, trunks of trees,
heaps of lime stones in all shapes, like men, animals and horses,
dazzling and fatiguing the sight, spread about, and at intervals
rolling stones, and a little lower down, the small, gloomy, solitary
town. Here I threw myself down again and gazed upon the waste ruin
around, and upon the dark blue sky above me, strange how my spirit
wandered there! I cannot explain by any human language, how
instantaneously my heart was impressed with every feeling of belief,
with every noble thought, how creation, nature, and the strangest
mystery, man with his wonderful energies and his common dependance on
the elements, how vain, how contradictory and ridiculous all this
appeared to me now. I could not collect myself, I was compelled
incessantly to follow this train of thought and to find relief in loud
laughter. Then there was no God, no spirit, nothing but puerility,
madness, and deformity, in all that creeps, swims, and flies,
especially in this ball tha