“My parents were grieved by my monomania. I had indeed determined to leave them, and seek some distant secluded spot in which I might remain undisturbed and alone. Conscience smote me in vain; my project was at last confided to a friend of the family, who after I had left broke the news to my parents, telling them I had voluntarily renounced the world. Never shall I forget stealing like a thief from the home of my childhood. The morning mist rose over the mountain from the valleys in blinding masses. Soon settling into clouds, one of pearly whiteness, fringed with the golden light of dawn, floated like a curtain in front of my old home. “It was a glorious scene; I could dimly descry my father returning from the chase laden with a store of game. Snow mantled the heights, and an icy wind rising with the sun shook the dark pines. The violence of the wind increased, the clouds were driven, torn into shreds, against the jagged rocks, and scattered like flames of living fire flying over the pine forests. The wind, after a fearful blast and deep-drawn sigh, paused as if to view the sport, then rising suddenly, lifted the vapour from the hollows, chasing it from its warm bed up the snowy steeps, and spreading it out in a dark veil across the sun. In the deep gloom the voices of a thousand fiends seemed to rise from vale and crag. The caverns and gorges were filled with the spirits of a gathering storm, shrieking and clamouring like a crowd at the gates of hell, impatient to be let loose to lay waste the land. At last they burst forth; onward they came, guided by a sword of lightning that shivered a great rock close to my feet, and pierced the heart of my favourite tree. I rolled over in a faint of panic fear, and awoke to see the wreck of many a green sapling, the pathways strewn with leaves, branches, and the trunks of giant pines. The storm had abated, and in its track left angry torrents leaping from the once dry rocks, gathering force and roaring in brown torrents down through the chasms, to flood and wreck {311} the smiling plains beneath. This is not all, for a sentimental Bear is a great observer. “The sun again shone upon the scene with the brightness of hope to the torn breast of Nature, for every green thing took heart and expanded beneath its welcome rays. As for me, nothing daunted, I started and pursued my way until I found a spot inaccessible to everything but sweet solitude and myself. “During live years my only visitor was an Eagle who perched on a stunted tree not far off. No other living creature had ventured to invade my horizon. “My occupations were very simple. At dawn I sat on a ledge of rock watching sunrise. The freshness of the morning filled me with a sense of newness of life, and a vividness of imagination whose fruit was a palingenesian poem, in which I meant to express all the griefs of those who had raised the cup of happiness to their lips, only to find it empty and polluted.