ot only
designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
itself.

In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--a
mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.

* * * * *

It is interesting to look on one or tw