ey touch and interest.

Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and
passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the
Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland,
where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed
thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame
or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might
be placed these words only: _Eternite, deviens mon asile!_

The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and
fortunate authors of his own day,--Chateaubriand and Madame de
Stael,--are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these
eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though
_Obermann_, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost
entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of
sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him
from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him
in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is the
most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinising. His chief work,
too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its
author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has
been impelled, lives in the letters of _Obermann_; the dissolving
agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French
Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which
our own time is but now more fully bringing to light,--all these are to
be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem
that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.

Besides _Obermann_ there is one other of Senancour's works which, for
those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting; its title
is, _Libres Meditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu_.]

[Footnote 26: NOTE 26, PAGE 326.

_Behind are the abandon'd baths._

The Baths of Leuk. This poem was conceived, and partly composed, in the
valley going down from the foot of the Gemmi Pass towards the Rhone.]

[Footnote 27: NOTE 27, PAGE 332.

_Glion?----Ah, twenty years, it cuts._

Probably all who know the Vevey end of the Lake of Geneva, will
recollect Glion, the mountain-village above the castle of Chillon. Glion
now has hotels, _pensions_, and villas; but twenty years ago it was
hardly more