their shape, life, and trembling; here and
there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their
movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the
first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle
barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and
its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before
me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany),
the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing
light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I
have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a
gesture of victory.

My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little
way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and
dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the
east.

There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have
in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without
doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with
security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.

The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the
new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
immediate sleep.

I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
prayer--and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
adoration--this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
complete and glorious.

Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made
the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I
reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad
that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then
(leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a
path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way.
For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the
hill, there opened gradually before