I admit all this; but let us well understand one another: it is not the mountains that exist such as we think that we see them then; it is the mountains as the passions, the talents and the muses have drawn their lines, coloured their skies, their snows, their peaks, their declivities, their irised cascades, their "soft" atmosphere, their light and tender shadows: the landscape is on Claude Lorrain's palette, not on the Campo Vaccino. Make me to love, and you shall see that a solitary apple-tree, weather-beaten, flung crooked-wise amid the wheat-fields of the Beauce; the flower of an arrow-head in a marsh; a little water-course in a road; a scrap of moss, a fern, a tuft of maiden-hair fern on the side of a rock; a moist, smoky sky; a tomtit in a vicarage garden; a swallow, flying low, on a rainy day, under the thatch of a barn or along a cloister; even a bat taking the place of the swallow around a country steeple, fluttering on its gauzy wings in the last gloaming of the twilight: all these little things, attached to a few memories, will become enchanted by the mystery of my happiness or the sadness of my regrets. On the upshot, it is the youth of life, it is the persons that make fine sites. The ice-floes of Baffin's Bay can be smiling, with company after one's heart: the banks of the Ohio and the Ganges mournful, in the absence of all affection. A poet has said: La patrie est aux lieux où l'âme est enchantée[450]. It is the same with beauty. Here is too much about mountains: I love them as great solitudes; I love them as the frame, the border and the distance of a fine picture; I love them as the rampart and refuge of liberty; I love them as adding something infinite to the passions of the soul: equitably and reasonably, that is all the good to be said of them. If I am not to settle down on the other side of the Alps, my journey across the Saint-Gotthard will remain a disconnected fact, an optical view in the midst of the pictures of my Memoirs: I will put out the lamp and Lugano will relapse into darkness. [Sidenote: Lucerne cathedral.]