Father Johann Rudolf Meyer, Citizen of Aarau: A Memorial

taken by the sublimity of so many new impressions, it raised him, full of anticipation, from the immeasurable nature of the sensory world closer to the infinite. These hours had an effect on his entire life. "Never," he wrote to a friend long afterward, "never can I look at the ice walls of our fatherland without a solemn feeling of devotion, and without rejoicing that I am a Swiss." He did not speak of any other mountain journey—and he made many subsequently—with as much frequency or pleasure. However, he most loved to recount—and did so countless times until his oldest age, with the most vivid recollection and never without tears—how heartily he was received in the Oberland village of Walterswyl, and how he was blessed like a father by the pastor, a venerable old man to whom he was closely related. Had he been a poet, he would have immortalized these moments of his youth just as the seventy-six-year-old singer of the Messias Messiah 2) See Klopstock's Works, Vol. VII, p. 19. immortalized the blessing of his grandmother through inspired words.