one could
ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]

This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was
too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the
stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he
found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that
which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded
the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an
angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this
austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes,
he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I
did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad
before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is
for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no
distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so
much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm
that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained
for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.
And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this
critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.
Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or
spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a
personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim
and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most
deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of
a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no
normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich
life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the
town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept
the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and
bitterness.

At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
from having a moment of sleep, he used to tr