The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm emotion.  The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul, which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can feel.  How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the very highest without overflowing.  My eye and my soul were both able to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied by nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their impression, they had on me their full and natural effect.  When we compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind from its own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor expedient, after all, the latter is....

When we see such objects as these for the first time, the unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the mind and draws from us the most delicious tears....  If only destiny had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand scenery, then would I every morning have imbibed greatness from its grandeur, as from a lonely valley I would extract patience and repose.

One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these singular forms....  These masses must have been formed grandly and simply by aggregation.  Whatever revolutions may subsequently have up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of the masses....  One feels deeply convinced that here there is nothing accidental, that here there is working an eternal law which, however slowly, yet surely governs the universe.

By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up the Dole: 

The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ...  Vevey....  There are no words to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the line of glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back again to the mountains.

From Cluse he wrote: 

The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of September, and the country we travelled through beautiful.  Many of the trees still green; most of them had assumed a brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare.  The crops were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the landscape.

At Chamouni, about effects of light: 

Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere.  I never remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light.

At the Col de Baume: