*
Lucerne, 20, 21 and 22 August 1832.
I left Lugano without sleeping there; I have re-crossed the Saint-Gotthard, I have seen again what I had seen: I have found nothing to correct in my sketch. At Altdorf, everything was changed since twenty-four hours ago: no more storm, no more apparition in my lonely room. I came to spend the night in the inn at Flüelen, having twice covered the road the ends of which come out upon two lakes and are held by two nations joined by the same political bond and separate in every other respect I crossed the Lake of Lucerne; it had lost a portion of its merit in my eyes: it is to the Lake of Lugano what the ruins of Rome are to the ruins of Athens, the fields of Sicily to the gardens of Armida.
For the rest, it is vain for me to exert myself to attain the Alpine exaltation of the mountain authors: I waste my pains.
Physically, that virgin and balmy air, which is supposed to revive my strength, rarefy my blood, clear my tired head, give me an insatiable hunger, a dreamless sleep, produces none of those effects for me. I breathe no better, my blood circulates no faster, my head is no less heavy under the sky of the Alps than in Paris. I have as much appetite in the Champs-Élysées, as on the Montanvers, I sleep as well in the Rue Saint-Dominique as on the Mont Saint-Gotthard, and, if I have dreams in the delicious plain of Montrouge, the fault lies with the sleep.
Morally, in vain do I scale the rocks: my mind becomes no loftier for it, my soul no purer; I carry with me the cares of earth and the weight of human turpitudes. The calm of the sublunary region of a marmot is not communicated to my awakened senses. Poor wretch that I am, across the mists that roll at my feet I always perceive the full-blown face of the world. A thousand fathoms climbed into space change nothing in my view of the sky; God appears no greater to me from the top of a mountain than from the bottom of a valley. If, to become a robust man, a saint, a towering genius, it were merely a question of searing over the clouds, why do so many sick men, miscreants and fools not take the trouble to clamber up the Simplon? Surely they must be very obstinately bent upon their infirmities.
A plague upon mountains!
The landscape is created only by the sun; it is the light that makes the landscape. A Carthaginian shore, a heath on the edge of Sorrento, a border of dried canes in the Roman Campagna are more magnificent, when lit up by the rays of the setting sun or the dawn, than all the Alps on this side of the Gauls. Those holes which they call valleys, where one sees nothing at full noon-day; those high fixed screens dubbed mountains; those soiled torrents which bellow with the cows on their banks; those violet-coloured faces, those goitrous necks, those dropsical bellies: a plague upon them!
If the mountains of our climes can justify the panegyrics of their admirers, it is only when they are wrapped in the night of which they thicken the chaos: the effect of their angles, their protuberances, their sweeping lines, their immense projected shadows is heightened by moonlight. The stars carve and engrave them on the sky in pyramids, cones, obelisks, in an architecture of alabaster, now casting over them a gauzy veil and harmonizing them with uncertain tints, faintly washed with blue; now sculpturing them one by one and separating them by lines of great precision. Every valley, every reduct, with its lakes, its rocks, its forests, becomes a temple of silence and solitude. In winter, the mountains offer us the image of the polar zones; in autumn, under a rainy sky, in their different shades of darkness, they resemble grey, black, bistre lithographs: the tempests also suit them, as do the vapours, half mists, half clouds, which roll at their feet or hang suspended at their flanks.
But are the mountains not favourable to meditations, to independence, to poetry? Do fine deep solitudes, mingled with sea, receive nothing from the soul, add nothing to its delights? Does a sublime nature not render us more susceptible to passion, and does passion not make us better understand a sublime nature? Is an intimate love not increased by the vague love of all the beauties of the senses and the intelligence which surround it, even as similar principles attract and blend with one another? Does not the feeling of the infinite, entering through a vast spectacle into a limited feeling, grow and spread to the boundaries at which commences an eternity of life?