The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the turmoil of waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice, the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the darkness and the gale. The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful; a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the _aure_: a sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828 and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832. At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino. On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages: it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy. One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a _fantoccini_ theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the cradle of Christopher Columbus. In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought on what the world might have become if that career had not been interrupted by a contemptible jealousy. Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as completely in its lonely streets as the Court of the Scaligers and the Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of rain. [Sidenote: The roll-call of the dead.]