Prudence is a
plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are
always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things
would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I
never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a
traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies,
like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations,
feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of
bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know
not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with
waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things
that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed
in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has
been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient
actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them.
The further I ascend from animated nature, from men, and cattle, and the
common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the
intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal
spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. "God is everywhere,"
I have exclaimed, and works everywhere, and where is there room for
death? In these moments it has been my creed, that death exists only
because ideas exist; that life is limitless sensation; that death is a
child of the organic senses, chiefly of the sight; that feelings die by
flowing into the mould of the intellect becoming ideas, and that ideas
passing forth into action, reinstate themselves again in the world of
life.
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