With a strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great
whole--le grand tout--into which all other things pass and lose
themselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less
can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts
went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little
village, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate of Anjou--la
douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure,
with its dark streets and its roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other
country, with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like
flowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fields
and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the
schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly,
everywhere builds up before or behind them.
He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there,
in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue,
the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up.
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