who takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.[65] The length is an essential part of the matter.  The whole work is the reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful weavings of a lonely and miserable man’s dreams.  And Julie expressed the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, “People are only happy before they are happy.  Man, so eager and so feeble, made to desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him, which delivers it over to him.  The land of chimera is the only one in this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist."[66]

Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the restoration of marriage in the New Heloisa to a rank among high and honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.  Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some natural sacrament.  “This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to the sovereign power nor to paternal authority,” he cried, “but only to the authority of the common Father.”  And he pointed his remark by a bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.[67] This was one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book.  In the case of its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage not only with equality but with religion.  We may imagine the spleen with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie’s eloquent account of her emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar.  “I seemed to behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service.  The purity, the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even for their own sake—­all this made such an impression on me that I seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution.  An unknown power seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature.  The eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the depth of my heart."[68] She has all the well-known fervour