The lake is bordered by shores more spacious and richer than those of the lake of Neuchâtel, for the mountains on the far side leave more room and more charm for cultivation. To the east one sees fine vineyards, a few manufactories, prettily cleared countryside, covered with fruit trees, and dotted with country houses. There one tries to offer a little land in supplement to the winegrowers' country, and thus one makes a little garden in the shape of an island, planted with choice trees, and adorned with light cabins that grace the shore. But the islet is small; one can neither live on it nor visit it with ease. Nor is that all: the waters are not so calm that one is not sometimes obliged to struggle against the waves, and one must leave the boat. One then takes another way, arriving across the lake at the great island, where one lands on a more spacious isle. It is an island about a league around, planted with fine trees, offering the walker pleasant and shady paths. There stands a house belonging to the hospital of Bienne, which serves as a refuge for pilgrims and travelers during the bad season. But I am straying from my subject; it calls me back to its own. When I thought of my former life, and saw how far away I was from it, I said to myself: so this is what I have lost! And I recalled with sorrow the labors, the agitations, the troubles of my past life. But these movements of regret, which did come to me, came without plunging me into misery; they drew from me only tears of grief mingled with tenderness, and that tenderness was sweet. It seemed to me that I was regaining a taste for life. A continual and gentle motion succeeded the pain. The state of reverie, in which I so often found myself, was perhaps the sweetest I have ever known. How wrong I was to seek elsewhere for goods that I found in the exercise of my heart! When I think of it today, I cannot regret it enough. The peaceful and the calm sufficed me; I wished for nothing better. I felt almost no other sentiment than that of existing, and I was happy. But if one would have this happiness contain something more substantial, more perceptible, the soul must attach itself to it, and one must have objects of pleasure to which it can surrender itself. But there must be agreeable and continued sensations, not vivid ones. There must be moments of ecstasy, and no torment. There must be a life one can enjoy peacefully, not a life tormented by passions. Life is short, and one must not lose it in torments. Of all the exercises that can occupy a man alone and require no assistance from others, reading is the most useful, the most suited to solitude, and the most agreeable; that is about all I can still do. But it is not my only pleasure; I walk, I dream, I abandon myself to the contemplation of nature. Long reveries, intoxicating me with a thousand delicious sensations, cast me into ecstasy; it was then that the disposition of my soul was such that I felt almost no sentiment of existence. When, on the water's edge, I watched the motion of the waves and heard their sound, I felt an inexpressible sweetness. Whichever way I turned, I saw an object that charmed my gaze; the waters, the shores, the mountains, the trees offered my eyes an admirable spectacle. Never have I felt more keenly than in those moments the truth of what I so often said: that true happiness consists in that state in which the soul finds a support sufficient for it to rest upon entirely, and where, no longer feeling time, duration no longer exists for it.