His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor! nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing _pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered with its wounds. You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards your neighbor the dirt-balls and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a straw, &c. worthy--" You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do. 502d STATION. The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The Sofa-cushions. Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.