l, the possessions which we could not lose without
becoming bankrupt. They are rather among the instruments which,
having served their purpose, may be laid aside, however interesting as
mementoes or admirable as curiosities. Their highest qualities--their
fervor, simplicity and grace--do not of themselves disclose the secret
of their power. From the point of view of mere literary criticism we
are apt to be more observant of their defects than their beauties. By
the side of earlier and later models they are seen to be deficient in
the very qualities--force of passion and depth of thought--by which
they startled or enthralled contemporary readers.

If we turn to the man himself, we might imagine at the first glance
that none could have been less fitted for the position of a leader of
thought, a founder of systems and schools, the apostle of a new era.
The career for which Nature seemed to have destined him, and which, in
truth, he may almost be said to have followed, was that of a vagabond,
or at the best a recluse. Of all the advantages we desire and
anxiously seek for our children, Rousseau enjoyed none. Poverty,
degradation and neglect weighed upon him from his birth. The evil
in him was unchecked, the good unfostered, by any training hand. The
opportunity and the faculty of acquiring any substantial nutriment
from books seemed alike denied him. His intercourse with mankind
through all his earlier and the greater part of his later life was
confined to the ignorant, and with these alone was he ever able
to hold any harmonious relations or any grateful interchange of
sentiment. Physically, mentally and morally diseased, weak yet stern,
sensitive but unpliant, equally devoid of courage and of tact, he
could not come in contact with the world without suffering a shock
and swift recoil that drove him back to the refuge of solitude--to the
mute companionship of external Nature or the brooding contemplation of
himself. Even the ideals which, despite his practical aberrations
from them, he yet intensely worshiped, had, in his conception of them,
little connection with the activities of life: truth, simplicity,
order, purity and peace were ideas that occupied his soul only to fill
it with a horror of reality, with yearnings for an idyllic repose,
with dreams of a state which he persuaded himself had been the
original condition of the race, in which virtue and right must prevail
through the mere absence of occasion for wrong or