Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth
more permanent improvements. The dream of health is perfect while
it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out
the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you
are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in
living as merry as it proves to be transient.
The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the
levity and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more
stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted
landscape: all have their part in the effect and on the memory,
'tous vous tapent sur la tete'; and yet when you have enumerated
all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the
delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say, and yet
excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than
an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of France known in
England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as
verse. It is more than probable that in its noble natural
condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in
the 'Musketeers.' Now, if the reader has ever washed down a
liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth,
on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide,
he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely
grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow
and sunshine of the Alps.
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