No human eye could discover where I am. In shadows that only the noonday dissipates, the strand of this little lake, shaking with the unceasing plunge of the cascade, is my habitation. Above, where an inexhaustible torrent falls from the gorge, only this handful of sparkling milk-white water reaches me directly from the generous sky. The stream escapes by this turning; and sometimes, mingled with the cries of the birds in the forest and with this soft gushing near me, I hear the voluble noise of falling waters behind me descending toward the earth. DECEMBER Sweeping the country and the leafy valley, thy hand, reaching these purple and tan-colored lands that thine eyes discover below thee, is arrested by them on this rich brocade. All is quiet and muffled; no green shocks, nothing new and young jars on the composure of the scene, on the harmony of these full and hollow tones. A somber cloud occupies the whole sky, heaping with fog the cleft of the mountain. One might say that it was dovetailed into the horizon. With thy hand, December, caress these large adornments, tufts of black pine like brooches against the hyacinth of the plain; verify with thy fingers these details sunk in the enmeshing fog of this winter day: a row of trees, a village. Truly the hour is arrested. Like an empty theater, abandoned to melancholy, the sealed-up countryside seems to listen for a voice so shrill that I cannot hear it. These afternoons in December are sweet. Nothing speaks as yet of the tormenting future, and the past is not yet so dead that it has no survivals. Of all the grass and of such a great harvest nothing remains but strewn straw and dry brush. Cold water softens the ploughed earth. All is finished. This is the pause, the suspension, between one year and the next. Thought, delivered from her labor, gives herself up to recollection with a sweet taciturnity, and, meditating on new enterprises, like the earth she tastes her sabbath. TEMPEST In the morning, leaving a shore the color of roses and of honey, our ship entered upon the high sea through streamers of low and sluggish fog. When, having wakened from this somber dream, I seek the sun, I see that it is setting behind us; but before us, bounding the black, dead spaces of the sea, one long mountain, like an embankment of snow, bars the north from one end of the sky to the other. This Alp lacks nothing, neither coldness nor rigidity. Alone in the midst of the solitude, like a combatant who advances in an enormous arena, our ship moves toward the white obstacle which rises cleaving the melancholy waters; and all at once a cloud hides the sky from us like the hood of a wagon drawn over it. In the cleft of daylight that it leaves on the horizon behind us, I look for the reappearance of the sun. The islands shine like a lighted lamp, and three junks stand out on the crest of the sea.