t in the exhilaration of the morning air of the
goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more
pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only
not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.
Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame
de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which
slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our
present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost
mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but
far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject
all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.
"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my
imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees,
languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he
employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of
Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.
The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the
transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in
the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions
by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by
introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which
prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The
egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than
the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural
objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous
force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and
the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the
other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but
animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover,
to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much
deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.

This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a ret