They were obliged to renounce it, for his mistress then was that admirable
fairy, invisible and dumb to the common herd, who displays her beauties to
the gaze of a chosen race alone, as she murmurs her divine and chaste
sonnets in their ear.

It was nature all radiant, which caressed his brow with the breeze, which
sang by his ear with the mysterious harmony of the woods, which gladdened
his sight with the flower of the fields, the verdant meadow, the golden
harvest. His loves were the hollow path which is lost in the mountain, the
old willow which leans over the edge of the pool, the sparrow which
chatters among the leaves, the splendours of the starry sky, the magic
mirages of the evening.

They were all the melodies which poets have made to vibrate on the strings
of lyres, and in those moments of delicious ecstasy he forgot the
vexations, the littlenesses and the miseries of the world, and if anyone
had asked him what was the aim of his life, he would have replied like
Anaxagoras:

"To love Nature, and to contemplate the sky."

But among his uncouth surroundings, who would have been capable of
understanding these sweet pleasures and that over-excitement of soul and
brain, by means of which he sought to benumb his senses and to change the
current of his heart, that heart which like the body has its imperious
needs.

He had reached that fatal epoch when man experiences an insatiable hunger
for love, and for want of a woman will nourish some monstrous fantasy, or