The splendour and health of the
new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
immediate sleep.
I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
prayer - and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
adoration - this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
complete and glorious.
Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made
the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I
reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad
that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then
(leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a
path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way.
For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the
hill, there opened gradually before me a silent and profound vale,
hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed
by a high bank beneath and between two peaks.
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