ave never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible
attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral
storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual convictions, of that
extraordinary group. Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent,
and that men find in them now only a charm and no longer a gospel,
explains the difference between the admiration which some of us permit
ourselves to feel for them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred
in our fathers. Then they were a danger, because they were a force,
misleading amiable and high-minded people into blind paths. Now this is
at an end, and, apart from their historic interest, the permanent
elements of beauty draw us to them with a delight that does not
diminish, as we recede further and further from the impotence of the
aspirations which thus married themselves to lofty and stirring words.
To say nothing of Rousseau, the father and founder of the
nature-worship, which is the nearest approach to a positive side that
the Revolution has ever possessed, how much fine colour and freshness of
feeling there is in _Rene_, what a sense of air and space in _Paul and
Virginia_, and what must they have been to a generation that had just
emerged from the close parlours of Richardson, the best of the
sentimentalists of the pre-revolutionary type? May we not say, too, in
parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of wisdom, but of a bald
and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the
reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of
civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre
pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence
of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are
content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant
effort? '_C'est peu de chose_,' says Obermann, '_de n'etre point comme
le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse,
que de n'etre plus comme le vulgaire des sages_.' This penetrating
remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself and most of the
school. He is absolutely free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and
breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and
fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find meditative repose amid
the heat and stress of that practical day, of which he and his school
can never bear the burden.

In that _vulgaire des sages_, of which