I often represented to my father that I was of an age when I should begin to do something, and attempt to take the burthen of myself and my sister off his hands. He would agree with me in my arguments, but when the moment came, he was always so overpowered with sorrow, that I could not induce myself to leave him for the few remaining days he had to live.
I seldom visited Thun or Interlaken; I did not feel pleasure in the society of men. I there found them engaged in all the petty interests, which pervade human breasts in the narrow sphere of a miserable provincial town. I found they could not sympathise with one whom they looked upon as a wild romantic mountaineer. About this time the French revolution began to exalt my imagination even more than the history of nations gone by, and I burnt with the desire of viewing nearer those actions, which in our solitary village, echoing only a
