Note 6 — Chapter XVIII

Nature was always "the best friend" of Tolstoy, as he loved to say: "A friend is good; but he will die, or he will go abroad, and one cannot follow him; while Nature, to which one may be united by an act of purchase or by inheritance, is better. Nature to me is cold and exacting, repulses me and hinders me; yet Nature is a friend whom we keep until death, and into whom we shall enter when we die." (Letter to Fet, May 19, 1861. Further Letters.) He shared in the life of nature; he was born again in the spring. "March and April are my best months for work." Towards the end of autumn he became more torpid. "To me it is the most dead of all the seasons; I do not think; I do not write; I feel agreeably stupid." (To Fet, October, 1869.) But the Nature that spoke so intimately to his heart was that of his own home, Yasnaya Polyana. Although he wrote some very charming notes upon the Lake of Geneva when travelling in Switzerland, and especially on the Clarens district, whither the memory of Rousseau attracted him, he felt himself a stranger amid the Swiss landscape; and the ties of his native land appeared more closely drawn and sweeter: "I love Nature when she surrounds me on every side, when on every hand the warm air envelopes me which extends through the infinite distance; when the very same lush grasses that I have crushed in throwing myself on the ground make the verdure of the infinite meadows; when the same leaves which, shaken by the wind, throw the shadow on my face, make the sombre blue of the distant forest; when the very air I breathe makes the light-blue background of the infinite sky; when not I alone am delighting in nature; when around me whirl and hum millions of insects and the birds are singing. The greatest delight in nature is when I feel myself making a part of all. Here (in Switzerland) the infinite distance is beautiful, but I have nothing in common with it." (May, 1851.)