to throb, as if he were about to be admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his heart.  There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him harmonise with the scenery of nature.  Who has not spent whole hours seated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves?  Who has not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows?  How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fulness of joy in the presence of its Author.” [32]

The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France.  He joined the army of the emigrees at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and returned to France.  He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into prison by the revolutionists.  “I wept,” said Chateaubriand, “and I believed.”  “Le Genie du Christianisme” was an expression of that reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution.  It came out just when Napoleon was negotiating his Concordat with the Pope, and was trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic posts.  “Le Genie du Christianisme” is indeed a plea for Christianity on aesthetic grounds—­an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity by making it look pretty.  Chateaubriand was not a close reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was weakened by vanity and shallowness.  He was a sentimentalist and a rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce sufficiently sincere.  He had in particular a remarkable talent for pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, enjoyed an extraordinary vogue.  The English version, made in 1815, was entitled “The Beauties of Christianity.”  For Chateaubriand undertook to show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief and worship.  He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante,