I began to feel less athirst. In the middle of summer the nights were cold, the mornings and evenings fresh. Those spotless snows, which I gazed at so eagerly and with insatiable eyes, purified me, it seemed, from the long, dusty, sun-burned, blood-besprinkled, and sublime, but also sometimes miry, revolutions of history. I recovered a little my equilibrium between the drama of the world and the eternal epopea. What can be more divine than these Alps? Elsewhere I have called them "the common altar of Europe." And wherefore? Not on account of their height,--a little higher, or a little lower, one is no nearer heaven,--but because the grand harmony, elsewhere vague, is palpable here. The solidarity of life, the circulation of nature, the beneficent concord of the elements,--all is visible. It kindles a glorious illumination. Each chain filters from its glacier, as a revelation of the inaccessible zone, a torrent which, concentrated, tranquillized and purified in an ample lake,--translated into pure and azure water,--emerges as a great river, and diffuses everywhere the soul of the Alps. From these innumerable waters reascend to the mountains the mists which renew the treasure of their glaciers. All is in such perfect sympathy, and the perspectives are so noble, that the lakes and their rivers still reflect or survey, as they wander afar, the grave assemblage of the mountains, the upper snows, the sublime virgin peaks of which they are an emanation. [Illustration] They face, they explain one another, harmonize with and love one another. But in what austerity! In their mutual love we recognize an identity of the strongest contrasts,--fixity and fluidity, rapidity and eternity, the snows above the verdure, forebodings of winter in summer. Hence results a prudent nature, a general sagacity in the things themselves. One enjoys without forgetting that one's enjoyment will not be of long duration. But the heart is not the less moved by a world of such seriousness and purity. This brevity attracts, and this austerity takes one captive. From the gleaming snows to the lakes, from the woods to the rivers and to the fresh emerald meads, a sovereign virginity predominates over the whole country. Such localities are for all the seasons of life. Old age grows strengthened by its association with nature, and greets without melancholy the grand shadows falling from the mountains. And hearts still young, which feel only the morning and the dawn, expand to the charming joys of religious tenderness,--tenderness for the Soul of the world, tenderness for its smallest infants.