I do not intend to give you an account of my journey in this letter; you shall see my remarks when we meet; they would take up too much of our precious correspondence. For the present, it will be sufficient to acquaint you with the situation of my heart: it is but just to render you an account of that which is entirely yours. I set out, dejected with my own sufferings, but consoled with your joy; which held me suspended in a state of languor that is not disagreeable to true sensibility. Under the conduct of a very honest guide, I crawled up the towering hills through many a rugged unfrequented path. Often would I muse, and then, at once, some unexpected object caught my attention. One moment I beheld stupendous rocks hanging ruinous over my head; the next, I was enveloped in a drizling cloud, which arose from a vast cascade that dashing thundered against the rocks below my feet; on one side, a perpetual torrent opened to my view a yawning abyss, which my eyes could hardly fathom with safety; sometimes I was lost in the obscurity of a hanging wood, and then was agreeably astonished with the sudden opening of a flowery plain. A surprising mixture of wild, and cultivated, nature, points out the hand of man, where one would imagine man had never penetrated. Here you behold a horrid cavern, and there a human habitation; vineyards where one would expect nothing but brambles; delicious fruit among barren rocks, and corn fields in the midst of cliffs and precipices. But it is not labour only that renders this strange country so wonderfully contrasted; for here nature seems to have a singular pleasure in acing contradictory to herself, so different does she appear in the same place, in different aspects. Towards the east, the flowers of spring; to the south; the fruits of autumn; and northwards the ice of winter. She unites all the seasons in the same instant, every climate in the same place, different soils on the same land, and with a harmony elsewhere unknown, joins the produces of the plains to those of the highest Alps. Add to these, the illusions of vision, the tops of the mountains variously the illumined, the harmonious mixture of light and shade, and their different effects in the morning and the evening as I travelled; you may then form some idea of the scenes which engaged my attention, and which seemed to change, as I past, as on an enchanted theatre; for the prospect of mountains being almost perpendicular to the horizon, strikes the eye at the same instant, and more powerfully, than that of a plane, where the objects are seen obliquely and half concealed behind each other.