O dear heart! would that I could!--But do not lose hope. You are lovely and still very young. You have many avenues of lindens and flowering acacias to pass through before reaching the damp road lined with box and leafless trees, which leads from the tomb of porphyry in which your happy dead years will be buried, to the tomb of rough and moss-covered stone where they will hasten to bestow the remains of what once was you, and the wrinkled, tottering spectres of the days of your old age. You still have much of the mountain of life to climb and it will be long before you reach the zone where the snow begins. You are now only at the level of aromatic plants, of limpid cascades over which the iris suspends its tri-colored arches, of stately green oaks and sweet-smelling larches. Mount a little higher and from that point, with the broader horizon spread out before you, perhaps you will see the blue smoke rising above the roof beneath which he who will love you sleeps. You must not, in the very beginning, despair of life, for vistas open in our destiny which we had ceased to expect. Man, in his life, has often made me think of a pilgrim toiling up the winding stairway of a Gothic tower. The long granite serpent winds upward in the darkness, every coil a stair. After a few circumvolutions the little light that came from the door dies out. The shadow of the houses, which are not yet passed, does not allow the loopholes to admit the sun: the walls are black and moisture oozes from them; you seem rather to be going down into a dungeon from which you are never to come forth, than ascending to the turret which, from below, seemed to you so slender and graceful, covered with lace-work and embroidery as if it were about starting for the ball.--You hesitate whether you ought to go higher, the damp shadows weigh so heavily upon your forehead.--A few more turns of the staircase and more frequent openings cast their golden trefoils on the opposite wall. You begin to see the notched gables of the houses, the carving of the entablatures, the strange forms of the chimneys; a few steps more and your eye overlooks the whole city; it is a forest of steeples, of spires and towers, bristling upon all sides, toothed and slashed and hollowed, stamped as with dies, and allowing the light to shine through their numberless apertures. The domes and cupolas raise their rounded forms like a giant's breasts or the skulls of Titans. The islets formed by houses and palaces appear through shadowy or luminous openings. A few steps more and you will be on the platform; and then you will see, beyond the walls of the city, the green fields, the blue hill-sides and the white sails on the