ncient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
man's life.[77]

"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I
should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
th