In his repugnance for realities, no solitude is too complete for Obermann. He lives alone, avoiding both cities and villages. There is in him the strangest mixture of love for mankind in general and complete indifference in all the relations of real life. So sensitive is he, that he is afflicted by scruples about his addiction to the mild dissipation of tea-drinking (tea being very characteristically his favourite beverage). He finds that it distracts his melancholy (le thé est d'un grand secours pour s'ennuyer d'une manière calme), but he despises all external excitement and stimulant. He is aware that he is far from being French in this respect, for, he aptly remarks, if Frenchmen inhabited Naples, they would build a ball-room in the crater of Vesuvius. He does not truly live except when he is entirely alone, in mist-veiled forests which recall the inevitable Ossian, or at night by the silent shores of a Swiss lake. Like his contemporary Novalis, he feels that darkness, by veiling visible nature, forces man's Ego back into itself. Speaking of a night he passed alone with nature, he says: "In that one night I experienced all that mortal heart can know of unutterable longing, unutterable woe. In it I consumed ten years of my life." And he attains to an even more profound self-consciousness by day, in the snow-fields of the Alps, where all surrounding life is not only veiled, as by night, but is frozen and apparently at a standstill. He is most himself when he climbs from the Swiss valley in which he lives up to the desolate wilds of the highest mountains. With an indescribable, almost boyish gladness, he watches the form of his guide disappearing in the distance; revelling in loneliness, he becomes oblivious of time and humanity. Note him in these surroundings: "The day was hot, the horizon misty, and the valleys full of vapour. The lower atmosphere was lighted up by bright reflections from the glaciers, but absolute purity seemed the essential quality of the air I breathed. At this height no exhalation from the lower regions, no earthly light, troubled the dark, infinite depths of the sky. It had no longer the pale, clear, soft blue colour of the vault we look up to from the plains; no, the ether permitted the sight to lose itself in boundless infinity, and, heedless of the glare of sun and glacier, to seek other worlds and other suns as it does by night. Imperceptibly, the vapours of the glaciers rose and formed clouds under my feet. My eyes were no longer wearied by the sparkle of the snow, and the heavens grew darker and deeper still. The snowy dome of Mont Blanc lifted its immovable mass above the moving grey sea of piled-up mist which the wind raised into enormous billows. A black speck showed far down in their abysses; swiftly rising, it advanced directly towards me. It was a great Alpine eagle; its wings were wet and its eyes were fierce; it was seeking prey. But at the sight of a human being it uttered a