'I have this conviction full on my mind,' he wrote, 'that intellectual beings spring from the same breath of Infinite Intelligence, and return to it again, but by different courses. Like rivers born amid the clouds of heaven, and lost in the deep and eternal ocean--some in youth, rapid and short-lived torrents; some in manhood, powerful and copious rivers; and some in age, by a slow and winding course, half lost in their career, and making their exit by many sandy and shallow mouths.' The current of his own life now carried him back in one of its eddies to London, which he reached on 6th October. The winter was passed in town, but the state of his health prevented any great exertion, and did not permit his seeing much society; yet the world can scarcely be said to have been the loser; for in his retirement he composed (being now nearly fifty years of age), that delightful book, dear to every angler, 'Salmonia.'[117] Returning spring revived his desire to revisit what he considered the finest scenery in the world, namely, the Alpine valleys of Illyria and Styria; and at the end of March he left England, accompanied by a young medical gentleman (his godson), Mr. Tobin, the son of a much-valued old friend. His pursuits were much as usual, and, living somewhat more generously, he more than once entertained some faint hopes of his ultimate recovery; 'attaching,' as he himself put it, 'a loose fringe, of hope to his tattered garments.' His mind was fully active during this summer, as may be judged from his having now planned his well-known work, 'Consolations of Travel,' which he used to say 'contained the essence of his philosophical opinions;' and from his having sketched out a slight plan for his own memoirs. Stress of weather detained him a short time at Wurzen, and here he occupied the time of his detention by writing his little Irish romance, 'The Last of the O'Donoghues.' He also now sent to press the second edition of his 'Salmonia,' which he thought 'twice as good, as well as twice as big' as the first. At Trieste he resumed his experiments on the electric eel, and at length satisfied himself that under no conditions did the shock affect the magnet. This formed the subject of a paper--the last of a series which continued almost uninterruptedly for a period of twenty-eight years--published by the Royal Society. It was about this time that he made the noble and touching entry in his diary: 'Si moro, spero che ho fatto il mio dovere; e che mia vita non e stato vano ed inutile.'[118]