onless, and find them to be the source and
spring of richness and fertility to Europe, as the sun is of warmth
and light to the world--to pick your doubtfully hazardous way across
the glacier, and there read great Nature's receipt for making rivers.
You find that the nearer you climb towards the heavens, the more
palpable are the works of their Creator:--

"My altars are the mountains, and the ocean--
Earth, air, stars--all that proceed from the great Whole,
Who has made and will receive the soul."

As to how mine was likely to be disposed of, the moment had now
arrived when I was to consider; for not only had severe sickness
overtaken me, but I suspected that my death-blow had been received.
Severe sickness will bring the stoutest of us, and the most
unthinking, to reflect soberly on the past, the present, and the
future; at all events, it had this effect on me one night, among many
other restless and sleepless ones, as in solitude I watched the
flickering flame of the candle by my bedside. As for the present,
until the moment of leaving my country, I had bestowed but little
attention on it. It is the man of the world, who is wisely engrossed
with that period; and, unfortunately, I had never been gifted with, or
rather had never acquired, a sufficient stock of common sense to
enable me to approximate that character.

We all love to contemplate and dwell on the brightest side of things,
simply because that is the most pleasing to us; and having but little
self-denial, I ever enveloped myself in the past, the sunniest side of
my existence.

As for the future, with regard to a life to come, for that was what I
was now to think about, my opinion, if it could be called such,
laboured under confusion and inconsistency. Could anything have made
me more miserable than another, it would have been the doubt of it;
but from this I have ever been exempt, feeling assured, that were
there none, our minds would no more have been created capable of
entertaining an idea of it, than that our bodies would have been
hampered with legs for which there was to be no need--and as these
imply the function of walking, so our idea of futurity affords us the
proof of it. Yet happy as I was in its belief, I always regretted that
I had been born, notwithstanding that I was aware that an endless
sleep and non-existence must be one and the same thing. My love of
existence then, of some sort, must have been an acquired taste, like