tains. He was unusually depressed, and unusually disposed to regard
the absence from home as a banishment; and he tried subsequently to
account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes
casts before it. It was more probably due to the want of the sea air
which he had enjoyed for so many years, and to that special oppressive
heat of the Swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their
highest level. When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the
house, he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from, and the
air was intercepted by it. We see, nevertheless, in his description
of the surrounding scenery, a promise of the contemplative delight in
natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience, and
which seemed a new feature in it. He had hitherto approached every
living thing with curious and sympathetic observation--this hardly
requires saying of one who had animals for his first and always familiar
friends. Flowers also attracted him by their perfume. But what he loved
in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence, or
its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his works or his
conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms--by even
those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter
dwells. Such beauty as most appealed to him he had left behind with
the joys and sorrows of his Italian life, and it had almost inevitably
passed out of his consideration. During years of his residence in London
he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions,
other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to which
he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to
recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for
lack of food. But when a friend once said to him: 'You have not a great
love for nature, have you?' he had replied: 'Yes, I have, but I love
men and women better;' and the admission, which conveyed more than it
literally expressed, would have been true I believe at any, up to the
present, period of his history. Even now he did not cease to love men
and women best; but he found increasing enjoyment in the beauties of
nature, above all as they opened upon him on the southern slopes of the
Alps; and the delight of the aesthetic sense merged gradually in the
satisfied craving for pure air and brilliant sunshine which marked his
final struggle for ph