There are places and climates, seasons and hours, with their outward
circumstance, so much in harmony with certain impressions of the heart,
that Nature and the soul of man appear to be parts of one vast whole;
and if we separate the stage from the drama, or the drama from the
stage, the whole scene fades, and the feeling vanishes. If we take from
René the cliffs of Brittany, or the wild savannahs from Atala, the
mists of Swabia from Werther, or the sunny waves and scorched-up hills
from Paul and Virginia, we can neither understand Chateaubriand,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, or Goethe. Places and events are closely
linked, for Nature is the same in the eye as in the heart of man. We
are earth's children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that
the earth, our mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and
aspect, in melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us. One
cannot thoroughly enter into certain feelings, save in the spot where
they first had birth.