During the night I passed Airolo, Bellinzona and the Val Levantina: I did not see the ground, I only heard the torrents. In the sky, the stars rose among the cupolas and needles of the mountains. The moon was not at first above the horizon, but her dawn spread before her by degrees, like those "glories" with which the fourteenth-century painters used to surround the head of the Virgin: she appeared at last, scooped out and reduced to a quarter of her disc, on the denticulated top of the Furca; the tips of her crescent were like wings, one would have said of a white dove escaping from its nest in the rocks: by her light, enfeebled and rendered more mysterious, the hollowed-out luminary revealed to my eyes the Lago Maggiore at the end of the Val Levantina. Twice I had seen that lake, once when proceeding to the Congress of Verona, and again when going on my embassy to Rome. I then contemplated it in the sun, on the high-way of prosperity; now I caught a glimpse of it at night, from the opposite bank, on the road of misfortune. Between my journeys, separated by only a few years, a monarchy fourteen centuries old had passed away. It is not that I bear those political revolutions the smallest grudge; by restoring me to liberty, they have restored me to my own nature. I have still pith enough to reproduce the first fruit of my dreams, fire enough to renew my connexion with the imaginary creature of my desires. The time and the world which I have traversed have been for me but a double solitude in which I have kept myself such as Heaven made me. Why should I complain of the swiftness of the days, since I lived in one hour as much as those who spend years in living? [Sidenote: Lugano.] Lugano is a little town of Italian aspect: porticoes as at Bologna, people keeping house in the streets as at Naples, Renascence architecture, roofs without cornices, long and narrow windows, bare or adorned with a pediment and pierced up to the architrave. The town leans against a vine-grown hill-side commanded by two superposed mountain plains, one covered with pastures, the other with forests: the lake lies at its feet. On the topmost summit of a mountain to the east of Lugano, exists a hamlet whose women, tall and fair-skinned, have the reputation of the Circassians. The eve of my arrival was the festival of that hamlet; people had gone on a pilgrimage to beauty: that tribe is doubtless some remains of a race of northern Barbarians preserved unmixed above the populations of the plain. I have been taken to the different houses that had been mentioned to me as likely to suit me: I found one of them charming, but the rent was much too high.