ace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot
all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched
grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;
the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy,
surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and
only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night,
without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay
down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the
wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching
tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell
asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more
delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and
water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave
myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved
to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had
left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
lustily."[66]

There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any
thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies,
among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never
entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came,
his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it
had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.

One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
illustrating, too, how it was that his way o