I imagined him in his little room, leaning his elbows on the table, and watching the rain beating on the window-panes and the clouds passing above the curtain, while his dreams flew away.

I thought of the bitter loneliness of youth, with its intoxications, its nausea, and its bursts of love that sicken the heart.

Is it not here that our own grief was nourished, is this not the very Golgotha where the genius that fed us suffered its anguish?
Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills which future great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to see the spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it had retained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there.
His room! his room! his childhood's poor little room! It was here that he was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamoured for birth: Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the soft breeze of Florida, Velleda running through the woods in the moonlight, Cymodocee protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, and frail Amelie and pale Rene! One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead, never to return.

Now he is lost in the whirl of Paris and mingles with his fellow-men; and then he feels an impulse to travel and he starts off.
I can see him leaning over the side of the ship, I can see him looking for a new world and weeping over the country he has left.

He lands; he listens to the waterfalls and the songs of the Natchez; he watches the flowing rivers and the bright scales of the snakes and the eyes of the savages.