ply was,
"Well, father, we'll cry, then," a reply which would instantly
bring the tears to his eyes. "Ah!" he would exclaim with agitation,
"give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she
has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but _my_
son?" Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a
second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her
image engraven on his heart.

Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had
allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited.
While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it
became the spring of all my misfortunes.

"A feeling heart!" That expression tells the literary secret of
Rousseau. It is hardly too much to say that Rousseau was the first
French writer to write with his heart; but heart's blood was the ink in
which almost every word of Rousseau's was written. This was the spring
of his marvellous power. Rousseau:--

My mother had left a number of romances. These father and I betook
us to reading during the evenings. At first the sole object was, by
means of entertaining books, to improve me in reading; but, ere
long, the charm became so potent, that we read turn about without
intermission, and passed whole nights in this employment. Never
could we break up till the end of the volume. At times my father,
hearing the swallows of a morning, would exclaim, quite ashamed of
himself, "Come, let's to bed; I'm more of a child than you are!"

The elder Rousseau was right respecting himself. And such a father would
almost necessarily have such a child. Jean Jacques Rousseau is to be
judged tenderly for his faults. What birth and what breeding were his!
The "Confessions" go on:--

I soon acquired, by this dangerous course, not only an extreme
facility in reading and understanding, but, for my age, a quite
unprecedented acquaintance with the passions. I had not the
slightest conception of things themselves, at a time when the whole
round of sentiments was already perfectly familiar to me. I had
apprehended nothing--I had felt all.

Some hint now of other books read by the boy:--

With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The
History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's
"Dissertation on Universal History," Plutar