broth nor magic potion that “confused the chemic labour of the blood,” but the too potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had ever hardened against her intoxication.  Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance.  It is the constant and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout.  Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline.  He was at an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.

Wandering and dreaming “in the sweetest season of the year, in the month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear,” he began to wonder restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his soul.  Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused and unfruitful?  The feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let flow.  Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain.  He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl.  His imagination was kindled into deadly activity.  “The impossibility of reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings after my heart’s desire.  In my continual ecstasies, I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man.  Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether world.  I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.  If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]