and this letter is
shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.

[249] _Mem._, ii. 116.

[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.

[251] _Corr._, i. 245.

[252] _Phaedrus_, 230.

[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.

CHAPTER VII.

THE HERMITAGE.

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
Encyclopaedia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes
which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of
humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with
adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification
of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope
and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were
centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that
epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the
impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied
conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the
poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the
great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and
about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the
preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be
vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that
are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light
of a celestial brightness to come.

Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society
and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his
native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not
leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.
The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure
of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded
with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but
an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he
says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was
so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds,
and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so
worn out with pamph