In selecting the scenes for my new journey I was guided by my former experience.  I know no country more beautiful than that which may be called the Alpine country of Austria, including the Alps of the southern Tyrol, those of Illyria, the Noric and the Julian Alps, and the Alps of Styria and Salzburg.  The variety of the scenery, the verdure of the meadows and trees, the depths of the valleys, the altitude of the mountains, the clearness and grandeur of the rivers and lakes give it, I think, a decided superiority over Switzerland; and the people are far more agreeable.  Various in their costumes and manners, Illyrians, Italians, or Germans, they have all the same simplicity of character, and are all distinguished by their love of their country, their devotion to their sovereign, the warmth and purity of their faith, their honesty, and (with very few exceptions) I may say their great civility and courtesy to strangers.

In the prime of life I had visited this region in a society which afforded me the pleasures of intellectual friendship and the delights of refined affection; later I had left the burning summer of Italy and the violence of an unhealthy passion, and had found coolness, shade, repose, and tranquillity there; in a still more advanced period I had sought for and found consolation, and partly recovered my health after a dangerous illness, the consequence of labour and mental agitation; there I had found the spirit of my early vision.  I was desirous, therefore, of again passing some time in these scenes in the hope of re-establishing a broken constitution; and though this hope was a feeble one, yet at least I expected to spend a few of the last days of life more tranquilly and more agreeably than in the metropolis of my own country.  Nature never deceives us.  The rocks, the mountains, the streams always speak the same language.  A shower of snow may hide the verdant woods in spring, a thunderstorm may render the blue limpid streams foul and turbulent; but these effects are rare and transient:  in a few hours or at least days all the sources of beauty are renovated.  And Nature affords no continued trains of misfortunes and miseries, such as depend upon the constitution of humanity; no hopes for ever blighted in the bud; no beings full of life, beauty, and promise taken from us in the prime of youth.  Her fruits are all balmy, bright, and sweet; she affords none of those blighted ones so common in the life of man and so like the fabled apples of the Dead Sea—­fresh and beautiful to the sight, but when tasted full of bitterness and ashes.  I have already mentioned the strong effect produced on my mind by the stranger whom I had met so accidentally at Paestum; the hope of seeing him again was another of my motives for wishing to leave England, and (why, I know not) I had a decided presentiment that I was more likely to meet him in the Austrian states than in England, his own country.