‘Oh! for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless continuity of shade!’
Yet to what purpose utter such a wish, since it is impossible to stay there, and the moment you are separated from your fellows, you think better of them, begin to form chimeras with which you would fain compare the realities, find them the same as ever to your cost and shame—
‘And disappointed still, are still deceived!’
I found little of this _tracasserie_ at Gelamont. Days, weeks, months, and even years might have passed on much in the same manner, with ‘but the season’s difference.’ We breakfasted at the same hour, and the tea-kettle was always boiling (an excellent thing in housewifery)—a _lounge_ in the orchard for an hour or two, and twice a week we could see the steam-boat creeping like a spider over the surface of the lake; a volume of the Scotch novels (to be had in every library on the Continent, in English, French, German, or Italian, as the reader pleases), or M. Galignani’s Paris and London _Observer_, amused us till dinner time; then tea and a walk till the moon unveiled itself, ‘apparent queen of night,’ or the brook, swoln with a transient shower, was heard more distinctly in the darkness, mingling with the soft, rustling breeze; and the next morning the song of peasants broke upon refreshing sleep, as the sun glanced among the clustering vine-leaves, or the shadowy hills, as the mists retired from their summits, looked in at our windows. The uniformity of this mode of life was only broken during fifteen weeks that we remained in Switzerland, by the civilities of Monsieur Le Vade, a Doctor of medicine and octogenarian, who had been personally acquainted with Rousseau in his younger days; by some attempts by our neighbours to _lay us under obligations_, by parting with rare curiosities to Monsieur l’Anglois for half their value; and by an excursion to Chamouni, of which I must defer the account to my next.