The storm is beginning again; the lightning-flashes twist around the rocks; the echoes swell and prolong the sound of the thunder; the roaring of the Schœchen and the Reuss welcome the bard of Armorica. It is long since I found myself alone and free; nothing in the room in which I am locked: two beds for a waking traveller who has neither loves to put to sleep, nor dreams to dream. Those mountains, that storm, this night are treasures lost for me. What life, nevertheless, I feel in the depths of my soul! Never, when the most ardent blood flowed from my heart into my veins, did I speak the language of the passions with such energy as I might do at this moment. It seems to me as though I saw my sylph of the Combourg woods issue from the flanks of the Saint-Gotthard. Hast thou come to see me again, O charming phantom of my youth? Hast thou pity for me? Thou seest, I am changed only in face: ever chimerical, devoured by a causeless and unfed fire. I am leaving the world, and I was entering it when I created thee in a moment of ecstasy and delirium. This is the hour at which I invoked thee in my tower. I can still open my Window to let thee in. If thou art not satisfied with the charms which I lavished upon thee, I will make thee a hundred times more seductive; my palette is not exhausted; I have seen more beauties and I know how to paint better than I did. Come to sit upon my knees; do not be afraid of my hair, stroke it with thy fairy or shadowy fingers: it will turn brown again under thy kisses. This head, which these falling hairs do not make wiser, is quite as mad as it was when I gave thee being, eldest daughter of my illusion, sweet fruit of my mysterious loves with my first solitude! Come, we will once more mount the clouds together; we will go with the lightning to plough, illumine, set fire to the precipices by which I shall pass to-morrow. Come! Carry me away as in former days, but do not carry me back again. A knock at my door: it is not thou, it is the guide! The horses have arrived, we must start. Of this dream all that remains is the rain, the wind and I, an endless dream, an eternal storm. 17 _August_ 1832 (AMSTEG). From Altdorf to here, a valley between mountains close together, as one sees everywhere; the noisy Reuss in the middle. At the Hart Inn, a little German student, who has come from the Rhone glaciers and who said to me: "You gome vrom Altdorf this morning? You go vast!" He thought I was on foot, like himself; then, seeing my _char-à-bancs_: "Oh! Horses! Dat's tifferent!"