tet uns, durch einsames Gebuesch,
Durch stille Thaeler fortzuwandern; mehr
Und mehr verwoehnt sich das Gemueth und strebt
Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.

Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of
the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.

"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume
sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
ma