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 delicious reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it, restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."'
One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!'
However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had such moments--moments free from all earthly passion--on the lake and on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution.
The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany, of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating sense that he was part of a great system in which individual detail disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole.
'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her.
'The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge ... while plants grow under our very feet--lie, so to speak, in our very hands.'
He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when he was pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far off. His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his tormentors.
Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, the leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory.