en drunk in the land of its
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse.
It is more than probable that in its noble natural condition this was
the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the "Musketeers." Now, if
the reader has ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine
in question, and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a
sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as
genial, although strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the
nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we
need not say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks
in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.

The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways.
A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been recognised, and
may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to
that climate. People utter their judgments with a cannonade of
syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and the turn of a
phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the professional writer
many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At first he cannot write at
all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pressure of business, and
the brain, left without nourishment, goes into a mild decline. Next,
some power of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.
Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world
of blatant, hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old
joke, to be positively offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good
faith and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What
is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This
yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence
has come upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who
are to blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.
Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he
shall go down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter
inflections and more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there
seems to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygi