y contemplation of those who like to intoxicate themselves at
their leisure with Nature's charms, and to retire into a silence
unbroken by any sound but the eagle's cry, the intermittent warbling
of birds, and the roar of torrents falling from the mountains,'

Here he had a delightful Robinson Crusoe existence. The only other
human beings were the Bernese manager with his family and labourers.
He counted his two months among the happiest of his life, and would
have liked to stay for ever. True to his character, he proceeded to
analyze the charm of the episode, and decided that it was made up of
the _dolce far niente_, solitude, absence of books and writing
materials, dealing with simple folk, healthy movement in the open
air, field labour, and, above all, intercourse with Nature, both in
admiring and studying her. He was seized with a passion for
botanizing, and planned a comprehensive Flora Petrinsularis, dividing
the whole island into quarters, so that no part might escape notice.

'There is nothing more strange than the ravishment, the ecstasy, I
felt at each observation I made upon vegetable structure and
organization.

'I would go by myself, throw myself into a boat when the water was
calm, and row to the middle of the lake, and then, lying full-length
in the boat with my eyes to the sky, I would let myself drift,
sometimes for hours, lost in a thousand confused but delicious
reveries.... Often when the sunset reminded me that it was time to
return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to
pull with all my strength to get back before night-fall. At other
times, instead of wandering about the lake, I amused myself by
skirting the green shores of the island where the limpid water and
cool shade often invited to a bathe.... When the lake was too rough
for rowing, I would spend the afternoon scouring the island,
botanizing right and left. I often sat down to dream at leisure in
sunny, lonely nooks, or on the terraces and hillocks, to gaze at the
superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores--one side
crowned by near mountains, the other spread out in rich and fertile
plains, across which the eye looked to the more distant boundary of
blue mountains.... When evening fell, I came down from the higher
parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and
there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making
me oblivious of all other distraction, would plunge me into