sinister cry, precipitated itself into the mist and disappeared. This cry was echoed twenty times, but the echoes were dry sounds, without resonance, like so many isolated cries in the universal silence. Then all sank back into absolute stillness, as though sound itself had ceased to exist, as though the reverberating property of bodies had been universally suspended. Silence is unknown in the noisy valleys, it is only on these cold heights that this immobility reigns, this perpetual solemnity which no tongue can express, no imagination conjure up. Were it not for the memories he brings from the plains, man would believe up here that, leaving himself out of the question, movement did not exist; the motion of the stars would be inexplicable to him, even the mists seem to remain the same despite their changes. He knows that the moments follow each other, but he does not feel it. Everything seems to be eternally petrified. I could wish I had preserved a more exact remembrance of my sensations in those silent regions. In the midst of everyday life the imagination is hardly capable of recalling a sequence of ideas which present surroundings seem to contradict and thrust aside. But in such moments of energy one is not in a condition to think of the future or of other men and take notes for it and them, or to dwell upon the fame to be acquired by one's thoughts, or even to take thought of the common good. One is more natural; one is not bent on making use of the present moment, one does not control one's ideas, nor require one's mind to examine into things, discover hidden secrets, or find something to say which has never been said before. Thought is no longer active and regulated, but passive and free. One dreams, one abandons one's self, one is profound without _esprit_, great without enthusiasm, energetic without will." We can see him, this pupil of Jean Jacques, who has energy without will (exactly Obermann's case), sitting solitary amidst Jean Jacques's scenery. _René_ had widened the range of literary landscape. Instead of the Swiss lake and the woods and groves with which we began in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, _René_ and _Atala_ gave us the great primeval forest, the gigantic Mississippi and its tributaries, and all the glowing, dazzling colour and fragrant, intoxicating luxuriance of tropical nature. This was a fitting natural background for a figure like René's. The exiled Chateaubriand had wandered through such scenery, and it had left its imprint on him. Obermann is in his proper place in the desert silence and dumbness of the mountains. It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some day cast it from him?