166 PRÆTERITA-I

suppose myself an object of interest either to the ants or the butterflies; and the only qualification of the entire delight of my evening walk at Champagnole or St. Laurent was the sense that my father and mother were thinking of me, and would be frightened if I was five minutes late for tea.

I don’t mean in the least that I could have done without them. They were, to me, much more than Carlyle’s wife to him; and if Carlyle had written, instead of that he wanted Emerson to think of him in America, that he wanted his father and mother to be thinking of him at Ecclefechan, it had been well. But that the rest of the world was waste to him unless he had admirers in it, is a sorry state of sentiment enough; and I am somewhat tempted, for once, to admire the exactly opposite temper of my own solitude. My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,-if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world-the grazing and nesting in it,-the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could,-happier if it needed no help of mine,-this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

193. Whether we slept at St. Laurent or Morez, the morning of the next day was an eventful one. In ordinarily fine weather, the ascent from Morez to Les Rousses, walked most of the way, was mere enchantment; so also breakfast, and fringed-gentian gathering, at Les Rousses. Then came usually an hour of tortured watching the increase of the noon clouds; for, however early we had risen, it was impossible to reach the Col de la Faucille before two o’clock, or later if we had bad horses, and at

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