When he began to open up, it was after a sad fashion at first. To resume my simile of the pimpernel--it was to disclose a heart in which the glowing purple was blanched to a sickly violet. What happiness he had, came in fits and bursts, and passed as quickly, leaving him depressed and miserable. He was always either wishing to be happy, or trying to be sure of the grounds of the brief happiness he had. He allowed the natural blessedness of his years hardly a chance: the moment its lobes appeared above ground, he was handling them, examining them, and trying to pull them open. No wonder they crept underground again! It may seem hardly credible that such should be the case with a boy of fifteen, but I am not mistaken in my diagnosis. I will go a little further. Gifted with the keenest perceptions, and a nature unusually responsive to the feelings of others, he was born to be an artist. But he was content neither with his own suggestions, nor with understanding those of another; he must, by the force of his own will, generate his friend’s feeling in himself, not perceiving the thing impossible. This was one point at which we touched, and which went far to enable me to understand him. The original in him was thus constantly repressed, and he suffered from the natural consequences of repression. He suffered also on the physical side from a tendency to disease of the lungs inherited from his mother.
Mr Forest’s house stood high on the Grindelwald side of the Wengern Alp, under a bare grassy height full of pasture both Summer and Winter. In front was a great space, half meadow, half common, rather poorly covered with hill-grasses. The rock was near the surface, and in places came through, when the grass was changed for lichens and mosses. Through this rocky meadow now roamed, now rushed, now tumbled one of those Alpine streams the very thought of whose ice-born plenitude makes me happy yet. Its banks were not abrupt, but rounded gently in, and grassy down to the water’s brink. The larger torrents of Winter wore the channel wide, and the sinking of the water in Summer let the grass grow within it. But peaceful as the place was, and merry with the constant rush of this busy stream, it had, even in the hottest Summer day, a memory of the Winter about it, a look of suppressed desolation; for the only trees upon it were a score of straggling pines--all dead, as if blasted by lightning, or smothered by snow. Perhaps they were the last of the forest in that part, and their roots had reached a stratum where they could not live. All I know is that there they stood, blasted and dead every one of them.