does not,
perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm
of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health,
but it is fun.

There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness
of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks,
become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence.
The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the
hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an unverified
quotation from the Scots psalms, you feel yourself fit "on the wings of
all the winds" to "come flying all abroad." Europe and your mind are too
narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to
root out of your bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your
walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you
is volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the
strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are
half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be
so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and
though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a
song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with
aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is its
own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent
improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts; and if, in
trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination,
still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength
you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be
transient.

The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the levity and
quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more stirring than a tumult;
the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all have their part in the
effect and on the memory, "_tous vous tapent sur la tete_"; and yet when
you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to
qualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say,
and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater
than an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of France known in
England in some gaseous disguise, but wh