ificent beauties in which Nature rocks him there from his babyhood?
Is it that the heart becomes awed in presence of that sublime calm of
Nature, and, before he is aware of it, the passions have transformed
themselves into a religious adoration?"

But the true source of the Genevese author's purity was apart from,
though deeply influenced by Nature. He was a man of principle and of
religious faith. Toepffer had but to gaze into his own heart to find all
the sweet, the graceful, and the fresh poetry of his country. His
untiring and patient observation of Nature is the secret of his power as
a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him.
Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile
and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of
contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose
rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study.
An insect crawling on a leaf,--a bit of grass bringing the joy of its
short life around the stones of the pavement,--a cloud floating over the
meadows,--a murmur of voices in the air,--the wings of a butterfly, or
the thundering of the storm above the lake,--all and everything was the
domain where his genial disposition reaped so plentiful a harvest of
rare graces and smiles.

When Toepffer abandoned his brushes for his pen, it seems that the vision
of his mind became intensified, and he began to study man as minutely as
he had studied Nature. He became a moral portrait-painter, in the same
way as his illustrious townsmen, Calame and Diday, were landscape
painters. To analyze and to describe became the occupation he most
delighted in; and the more minute the analysis and the more subtile the
description, the more also was he pleased with it.

Toepffer's writings are eminently moral. There are few works in French
literature in which the moral aspiration is so alive and the worship of
duty so eloquently advocated. In reading them one feels that the writer
did not step beyond his own sentiments, that he did not borrow
convictions, that he did not affect the austerity of a stolen creed. He
writes as he feels, and he feels rightly,--never forgetting to remain
indulgent, even when he appears most unbendingly severe. Then to it all
he adds an inexhaustible cheerfulness. His mind wears no dark-colored
glasses; it is strong and healthy enough to bear the dazzling effulgence
of the sun. Toepffer was a