e more touch upon Reality,
struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his
Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that
defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart
of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of
the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and
Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and
knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem,
or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that
revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken
out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,--as clearly as he
could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those
stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we
will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings
to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he
cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance
for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life
lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I
call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in
Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes
pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not
genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kind
of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it
is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has
something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present astonishing
convulsionary "Literature of Desperation," it is everywhere abundant.
That same _rose-pink_ is not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a
Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, has seen
the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and will discriminate
them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all
disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In
Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil
which, under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically
it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris
garrets, in the gloomy compa