es.'[19]

He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured by
clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal
Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple
roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam.

St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with classic
culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters,
often shew a distinctly modern tone,[20] and go to prove that
asceticism so deepened and intensified character that even literary
style took individual stamp.[21] But the most perfect representative,
the most modern man, of his day was Augustine.

As Rousseau's _Confessions_ revealed the revolutionary genius of the
eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful character,
fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the problems of
the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of its own
passionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to a
glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and
drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for
translation. He said on one occasion:

For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of
hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In
the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild
beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves
beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was
loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please
the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to
the shores of matrimony....

Comfortless at the death of his friend:

I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within
me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my
carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither
in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even
the light itself, were filled with shuddering.

Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal present du
ciel qu'une ame sensible.'

He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing for
it in Nature and solitude, though in vain.

The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, air,
water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked and the
mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that everything in
heaven and e