hen
stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,
without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim
the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there
is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the
Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable
day.

But it must be said that all this came better and more
happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing
presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few
dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being
exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings
of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came
out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself
surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my
eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide
expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these
attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could
not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so
equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely
retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not
come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in
the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in
it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the
memory of all the woes of every sort that they have
delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...
Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above
this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly
intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
taken."

The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came
soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island
and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the
authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to
go, a