and accurately replace a past.  He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother.  He forgot, too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a man’s surroundings very critical.  Finally, he forgot that in proportion as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of making shipwreck.  Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy lay deeper,—­in temperament.

I.

Rousseau’s impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756).  “Although it was cold, and snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life; violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the first song of the nightingale.  I heard it close to my window in a wood that touched the house.  After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight.  My very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic objects about me.  Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out before the end of the next day.  The place, which was lonely rather than wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]

This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work.  But work was too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he found himself.  This exaltation was in a different direction from that which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.  Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity.  No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him.  “When I did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad before my eyes, I ceased to hate them.  My heart, little made as it is for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no distinction between their wretchedness and