Cares, sorrows, and perils, corporeal agony, and anguish of the heart, are often but as the fire which tempers the pure iron into the fine steel, at once proving and strengthening the spirit. The last grand lesson which leads generous youth to vigorous manhood, which confirms our powers, and gives the great man's mastery over Fate, is to endure; and I am inclined to believe that such sudden and unaccountable feelings of despondency--I do not mean the ordinary fits of gloom that haunt a moody and a wayward spirit, but, on the contrary, the dark impression, the heavy shadow that once or twice, in the midst of a bright lifetime, comes irresistibly upon a gay or placid mind--I am inclined to think, I say, that such despondence is only given to the highminded and the great: a prophetic voice, announcing, not to the ear, but to the heart, that the day of trial comes: the trumpet of Fate, calling on a champion, dauntless and strong, to rouse him to the battle, and arm his spirit for some awful strife. The day had been as bright and beautiful as a summer day in the south of Europe can be, and yet it had spared the traveller and the labourer many of the inconveniences and discomforts which those beautiful days of the south sometimes bring along with them: for the year was yet young, and with all the brightness of youth it had all the tenderness too. There had been a fresh breeze in the sky during the hotter part of the day; and one would have felt that it blew from the cool tops of snowy mountains, even had one not seen, from time to time, some of the distant peaks of the high Alps towering white over the greener hills below. There was also a world of streams, and rivulets, and cascades about, which gave additional freshness and life to the air that blew heavy with the perfume of the flowers upon the banks; and the high swelling of the mountains round still gave a pleasant shade to one side of the valley. Each sense had something to delight it; and there was over every object which nature presented that aspect of peaceful enjoyment which is the greatest soother of man's heart. The spot was in the extreme verge of Savoy, bordering upon France. It would little benefit the reader to say exactly where, for the aspect of the land has changed: the towns of that age and their laborious denizens would not be recognised by their successors of the present day; the castle, the fortress, and the palace are ruined and swept away, and even the roads themselves now wind through other valleys or climb over other hills. It was somewhere between Nice and St. Jean de Maurienne: that space is surely limited enough to afford the reader a definite idea of the scene. Let him take a map and a pair of compasses, he will find it but a span; and in reality it is less--with a universe around it.