one day late in february i found myself in vevey. i had come down with the break-up of the weather from montana, where i had met some oxford men i knew and had learned to ski. i had made a few of those vague acquaintances one makes in a winter-sport hotel, but now all these people were going back to england and i was thrown back upon myself once more. i was dull and angry and unhappy still, full of self-reproaches and dreary indignations, and then very much as the sky will sometimes break surprisingly through storm clouds there began in me a new series of moods. they came to me by surprise. one clear bright afternoon i sat upon the wall that runs along under the limes by the lake shore, envying all these people who were going back to england and work and usefulness. i thought of myself, of my career spoilt, my honor tarnished, my character tested and found wanting. so far as english politics went my prospects had closed for ever. even after three years it was improbable that i should be considered by the party managers again. and besides, it seemed to me i was a man crippled. my other self, the mate and confirmation of my mind, had gone from me. i was no more than a mutilated man. my life was a thing condemned; i had joined the ranks of loafing, morally-limping, english exiles.

i looked up. the sun was setting, a warm glow fell upon the dissolving mountains of savoy and upon the shining mirror of the lake. the luminous, tranquil breadth of it caught me and held me. "i am done for." the light upon the lake and upon the mountains, the downward swoop of a bird over the water and something in my heart, gave me the lie.

"what nonsense!" i said, and felt as if some dark cloud that had overshadowed me had been thrust back.

i stared across at savoy as though that land had spoken. why should i let all my life be ruled by the blunders and adventures of one short year of adventure? why should i become the votary of a train of consequences? what had i been dreaming of all this time? over there were gigantic uplands i had never seen and trodden; and beyond were great plains and cities, and beyond that the sea, and so on, great spaces and multitudinous things all round about the world. what did the things i had done, the things i had failed to do, the hopes crushed out of me, the tears and the anger, matter to that? and in some amazing way this thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter to me? "come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of the world. "whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the inexhaustible offer life makes you. we are you, just as much as the past is you."

it was as though i had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely multitudinous life can be. it was as if tarvrille's neglected words to me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....

i cannot explain how that mood came, i am doing my best to describe it, and it is not easy even to describe. and i fear that to you who will have had i hope no experience of such shadows as i had passed through, it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... i remember once i came in a boat out of the caves of han after two hours in the darkness, and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like waving flags and like the sunrise. and so it was with this mood of my release.

there is a phrase of peter e. noyes', that queer echo of emerson whom people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that sticks in my mind,—"every living soul is heir to an empire and has fallen into a pit." it's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves—to a more general self. i seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.

i suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious people use it, is very much this experience. if it is not the same thing it is something very closely akin. it is as if someone were scrambling out of a pit into a largeness—a largeness that is attainable by every man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.

i leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. i know that i went back to my hotel in vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to me, and my ideas running together into plans. and i know that i had come out that day a broken and apathetic man.