Autumn was already gone; but the sun shone out now and then between the
clouds and lighted and warmed the mild winter which had succeeded. We
tried to deceive ourselves, and to say that it was still autumn, so
much did we dread to recognize winter, that was to separate us. The
snow sometimes fell in the morning in light flakes on the roses and
everlastings in the garden, like the white down of the swans which we
often saw traversing the air. At noon the snow melted, and then there
were delightful hours on the lake. The last rays of the sun seemed to
be warmer when they played on the waters. The fig-trees which hung from
the rocks exposed to the south, in the sheltered coves, had kept their
wide-spreading leaves; and the reflection of the sun on the rocks
imparted to them the splendid coloring and the warmth of summer
evenings. But these hours glided as swiftly by as the stroke of the
oars which served to take us round the foam-covered rocks that form the
southern border of the lake. The glancing rays of the sun on the
fire-trees; the green moss; the winter birds, more fully feathered and
more familiar than those of summer; the mountain streams, whose white
and frothing waters dashed down the sides of the sloping meadows, and
meeting in some ravine fell with sonorous and splashing murmurs from
the black and shining rocks into the lake; the cadenced sound of the
oar, which seemed to accompany us with its mysterious and plaintive
regrets, like some friendly voice hidden beneath the waters; the
perfect repose we felt in this warm and luminous atmosphere, so near
each other, and separated from the world by an abyss of waters,--gave
us at times so great an enjoyment in the sense of existence, such
fulness of inward joy, such an overflowing of peace and love, that we
might have defied Heaven itself to add to our felicity. But with this
happiness was mixed the consciousness that it was soon to end; each
stroke of the oar resounded in our hearts as one step of the day that
brought us nearer to separation. Who knows whether these trembling
leaves may not to-morrow have fallen in the waters? If this moss on
which we still can sit may not to-morrow be covered with a thick mantle
of snow; if this blue sky, these illumined rocks and sparkling waves,
may not, during the mists of this next night, be enveloped and
confounded in one dim and wintry ocean?
A long sigh would escape our lips at thoughts like these; but we never
communicated them to each other, for fear of arousing misfortune by
naming it. Oh, who, in the course of his life, has not felt some joy
without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in
one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel
slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which
counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the
dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance,
or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and
brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of
our dreams on the bleak and barren strand of harsh reality.