sometimes , indeed , i felt a wish for happiness and thought with melancholy delight of my beloved cousin or longed , with a devouring maladie du pays , to see once more the blue lake and rapid rhone , that had been so dear to me in early childhood ; but my general state of feeling was a torpor in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in nature ; and these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and despair .