The next day we recommenced our wanderings. Ah, in those forests, how many trees, marked by my knife, bear on their roots or bark a sign by which I shall ever recognize them! They are those whose shade she enjoyed; those beneath which she breathed new life, basked in the warmth of the sun, or inhaled the sweet vernal scent of the trees. The stranger sees, but dreams not that they are to another the pillars of a temple, whose worshipper is on earth though its divinity is in heaven. I still visit them once or twice each spring, on the anniversaries of these walks; and when the axe lays one low, it seems to me as though it falls upon myself, and carries away a portion of my heart. LXXXVII. On one of the highest and most generally solitary summits of the park of St. Cloud, where the rounded hill descends in two separate slopes, one towards the valley of Sèvres, and the other towards the hollow where the Château stands, there is an open space where three long avenues meet. From thence the eye discovers from afar the rare passengers that intrude on the solitude of the place. The hill, like a promontory, overlooks the plain of Issy, the course of the Seine, and the road to Versailles; its summit, clothed and overshaded by the forest which fills up the triangular intervals between the three avenues, appears like the rounded basin of a lake of which grass and foliage are the billows. If one looks towards Sèvres, one sees only a long and sloping meadow stretching down towards the river like a verdant and undulating cascade, which, after a rapid descent, loses itself at the bottom of the valley in dark masses of thickets stocked with deer. Beyond these thickets, on the other side of the Seine, the blue slated roofs of Meudon, and the waving tops of the majestic trees of its park, stand out in the blue summer sky. We often came to sit on this hill, which has all the elevation of a promontory, the silence and shade of a valley, and the solitude of a desert. The lungs play freer there; the ear is less disturbed by the sounds of earth; the soul can better wing its flight beyond the horizon of this life.