arily lack.

There is indeed about Rousseau's allusions to places and spots which
had become dear to him from emotional association a lingering
regretful tenderness, full of wistful memories and a vague tremulous
yearning, which leaves upon the mind a feeling unlike that produced
by any other writer. The subconscious music of his days seems at
those times to rise from some hidden wells of emotion in him and
overflow the world.

When he speaks of such places the mere admixture in his tone of the
material sensuousness of the eighteenth century with something new
and thrilling and different has itself an appealing charm. The
blending of a self-conscious artificial, pastoral sentiment, redolent of
the sophisticated Arcadias of Poussin and Watteau, and suggestive
of the dairy-maid masquerades of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of
Versailles, with a direct passionate simplicity almost worthy of
some modern Russian, produces a unique and memorable effect
upon a sympathetic spirit.

The mere fact that that incorrigible egoist and introspective
epicurean, William Hazlitt, whose essays are themselves full of an
ingratiating and engaging sensuousness, should have taken
Rousseau as his special master and idealised him into a symbolic
figure, is a proof of the presence in him of something subtle,
arresting and unusual.

I always like to bring these recondite odours and intimations of
delicate spiritual qualities down to the test of actual experience, and
I am able to say that, through the help of Hazlitt's intuitive
commentaries, the idea of Rousseau has twined itself around some
of the pleasantest recollections of my life.

I can see at this moment as I pen these lines, a certain ditch-bordered
path leading to a narrow foot-bridge across a river in Norfolk. I can
recall the indescribable sensations which the purple spikes of
loosestrife and the tall willow-herb, growing with green rushes,
produced in my mind on a certain misty morning when the veiled
future bowed toward me like a vision of promise and the dead past
flew away over the fens like a flight of wild swans.

The image of Rousseau cherishing so tenderly every rose-tinged
memory and every leafy oasis in his passionate pilgrimage, came to
me then, as it comes to me now, a thing that no harsh blows of the
world, no unkind turns of fate, no "coining of my soul for drachmas"
can ever quite destroy.

There is, after all, a sort of spiritual second self, a sort of astra