and flow of the water, and the sound of it, restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious of existence without the trouble of thinking....  There is nothing actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart can truly say “I should like it to stay for ever."’

One thinks of Faust:  ‘O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!’

However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had such moments—­moments free from all earthly passion—­on the lake and on the island.  His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution.

The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany, of the effect of ’earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the world of which eyes and heart never weary,’ the intoxicating sense that he was part of a great system in which individual detail disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole.

’Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my imagination....  Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her.

’The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge ... while plants grow under our very feet—­lie, so to speak, in our very hands.’

He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when he was pursuing his botany in the woods.  He described one never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was quite alone.  He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far off.  His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his tormentors.

Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, the leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory.