a free consciousness, a free
will, or else to roll down, hopeless of safety, into a bottomless abyss.

But when you have consoled yourself for having lost the happiness of
nature, let its perfection be a model to your heart. If you can issue
from the circle in which art keeps you enclosed and find nature again, if
it shows itself to you in its greatness and in its calm, in its simple
beauty, in its childlike innocence and simplicity, oh! then pause before
its image, cultivate this feeling lovingly. It is worthy of you, and of
what is noblest in man. Let it no more come into your mind to change
with it; rather embrace it, absorb it into your being, and try to
associate the infinite advantage it has over you with that infinite
prerogative that is peculiar to you, and let the divine issue from this
sublime union. Let nature breathe around you like a lovely idyl, where
far from artifice and its wanderings you may always find yourself again,
where you may go to draw fresh courage, a new confidence, to resume your
course, and kindle again in your heart the flame of the ideal, so readily
extinguished amidst the tempests of life.

If we think of that beautiful nature which surrounded the ancient Greeks,
if we remember how intimately that people, under its blessed sky, could
live with that free nature; how their mode of imagining, and of feeling,
and their manners, approached far nearer than ours to the simplicity of
nature, how faithfully the works of their poets express this; we must
necessarily remark, as a strange fact, that so few traces are met among
them of that sentimental interest that we moderns ever take in the scenes
of nature and in natural characters. I admit that the Greeks are
superiorly exact and faithful in their descriptions of nature. They
reproduce their details with care, but we see that they take no more
interest in them and more heart in them than in describing a vestment, a
shield, armor, a piece of furniture, or any production of the mechanical
arts. In their love for the object it seems that they make no difference
between what exists in itself and what owes its existence to art, to the
human will. It seems that nature interests their minds and their
curiosity more than moral feeling. They do not attach themselves to it
with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that
characterize the moderns. Nay, more, by personifying nature in its
particular phenomena, by deifying it, by representing it