At length the past returned to my mind. Dim recollections, shadows that alternately advanced and eluded me, sketches of forms and events, like pictures unfinished by the pencil, lay before me, colorless and undefined. But day by day the outlines grew more complete, the figures assumed a body, they lived—they moved—they uttered sounds; and while to other eyes I was a solitary and hopeless fugitive from human converse, to my own I was surrounded by a circle of all that I loved, yet with a continued sense of privation, a mysterious feeling of something imperfect in the indulgence that dashed my cup with bitterness. [Sidenote: Salathiel Further Wanders] With the increase of my strength, I became a wanderer to great distances among the mountains. No persuasion of my kinsmen could restrain me from those excursions. The mildness of a climate in which the population sleep in the open air, and the abundance of fruits, met the two chief difficulties of traveling. I felt an irresistible impulse to penetrate the mountain ranges that rose in chains of purple and azure before me. With the artifice of the diseased mind, I made my few preparations in secret, and with but scrip and staff, marched forth to tread hill and valley, city and desert, were it to the last limit of the globe. Through what diversities of scene or impediments of road I passed no recollection remains with me. The same instinct which guides the bird led me to the fruit-tree and the stream, taught me where to shelter for the night, and gave me sagacity enough for the avoidance of the habitual dangers of a route seldom tried but by the wolf and the robber. My frame, gradually invigorated by exercise, bore me through all, and I scaled the chain of Libanus with an unwearied foot. There I reached the skirts of a region where the snow scarcely melts, even in the burning summer of Syria. The falling of the leaf and the furious blasts that burst through the ravines told me that I had spent months in my pilgrimage, and that I must brave winter on its throne. Still I persevered. I felt a new excitement in the new difficulty of the season; I longed to try my power of endurance against the storm, to wrestle with the whirlwind, to baffle the torrent. The very sight of the snow, as it began to sheet the sides of the lower hills, gave me a vague idea of a brighter realm of existence; it united the pinnacles with the clouds; the noble promontories and forest-covered eminences no longer rose in stern contrast with the sky; they were dipped in celestial blue; they wore the silvery and sparkling luster of the morning skies; they blushed in the effulgence of the sunset, with as rich a crimson as the cloud that crowned them. [Sidenote: In Sight of the Groves of Lebanon]