He is
perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not,
perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an
enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may
not be health, but it is fun.
There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile
joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the
snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your
prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast
your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the
words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel
yourself fit 'on the wings of all the winds' to 'come flying all
abroad.' Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of
energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed;
that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are
unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile;
and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength
is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half
conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be
so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and
though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a
song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with
aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.
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