 to be recalling such a dream. I see myself passing on
among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures,
castles, tombs, fantastic streets - the old abiding places of History and Fancy
- as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious
of the objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding
sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from
it - as at last I did, thank Heaven! - and from its long, sad, wretched dream,
to dawn.
    For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my mind.
Some blind reasons that I had for not returning home - reasons then struggling
within me, vainly, for more distinct expression - kept me on my pilgrimage.
Sometimes, I had proceeded restlessly from place to place, stopping nowhere;
sometimes, I had lingered long in one spot. I had had no purpose, no sustaining
soul within me, anywhere.
    I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great passes
of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the by-ways of the
mountains. If those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I
had found sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the
roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me
nothing else.
    I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest.
In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side,
from which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of
beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved
faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was
not all oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some
better change was possible within me.
    I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote heights
of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of the mountains
forming the gorge in which the little village lay, were richly green; and high
above this gentler vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry
snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these, were range upon
range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of
pasture, an gradually blending with
