lities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no
cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no
recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with
little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural
and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels
and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and
breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who
has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks
back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a
charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without
injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education
of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the
simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most
delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages
whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety,
sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind
impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time
came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of
their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air,
and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which
they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they
could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of
the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits
both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the
other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on
one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to
regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations
which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his
life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais ecrire que de ce qu'on
aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which
scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much
poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for
success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and
admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down
with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on
what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du