olonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find
that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there
is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is
only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for
phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure
or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the
imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the
strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of
his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually
rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not
either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such
states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should
have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be
presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we
meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger
in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness,
viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the
third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the
man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor
magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too
potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a
mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had
ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against
this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while
even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and
keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from
without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings
the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant
and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses
from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social
obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at
an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the
bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in
fair shapes.

Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in