Or, weary of the silence and the snow-solitudes, I close my eyes, and lo! I am down in the valley again, and all around me spreads a blithe and beauteous scene of serenest summer. On every breeze that sings from sunny slope or smiling pasture is borne the windy chime and clamour of countless cattle-bells from the hillside, but beyond that, and the unbroken _buzz_ and _burr_, which bespeak the deep content of innumerable bees, all is still, drowsily still. Here, if anywhere, one can realize for a moment the deep, dreamy peacefulness that pervades the opening lines of Mr. Swinburne's majestic "Garden of Proserpine,"-- "Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dream of dreams; I watch the green field growing, For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams." Here are the bees, the birds, and the butterflies; here, too, nestling cosily on hillside or meadow, are dotted dozens of umber-brown châlets, each of which seems to suggest that "haunting sense of human history" of which George Macdonald speaks, when he says that "many a simple home will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody." And now there is a change in the picture: the drowsiness and the dreaminess are gone, and there is the free, fresh sense of motion, and of the open. In my ears is the journeying music of the _diligence_--music which despite its jingle never becomes monotonous, for every now and then the horses toss their heads to shake off the too persistent flies, and sprinkle the air with spray of silvery sounds. The road winds along a mountain path overlooking a lake, and the mirroring of sunset fire upon the surface of the water, the cool clear crystal of the blue depths that swim away below, the purple distance of the farther hills, fast-shrouding in light-drawn mist, and lastly, the solemn splendour of that sky-hung, soaring summit, brooding like a presence athwart the skies,--all these make up a scene upon which I am never weary of dwelling, and which I dearly love to recall; a scene of such indescribable loveliness as to leave me at last bowed and breathless, and "Sad with the whole of pleasure."