INTRODUCTION. In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world. For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells. I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die, or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises it even more than I do.[1] I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil _offered_ to Christ and Louis XIV., and _gave_ to the popes. The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]