the wicked are extremely embarrassing.[82] His own search after knowledge of his fate is well known.  One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner by throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of the eternal pit.  He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at a particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then perdition.  With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away, all was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of theology, he passed his days in a state of calm.  Even when illness brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by more assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly qualifies as sensual.

In thinking of Rousseau’s peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired such a decisive place in his character during his life at Les Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modern literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awful moods into the service of the great revolt against a social and religious tradition that can no longer be endured.  Of this revolt Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connected with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of Manfred, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his own rebellion.  Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in men.  He liked rivulets better than rivers.  He could not bear the sight of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him with melancholy.  The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no attraction for him.  He could steep himself in nature without climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her.  In landscape, as has been said by one with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can, if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings; he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that the effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble heights of the Jura, and the lovely points of the valley of Chamberi, sufficed to give him all the pleasure of which he was capable.  In truth a man cannot escape from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for objects inspiring it.  Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and