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 présent 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 earth was a part of godhead, gave him no comfort; it was
rather the personal God of the Psalms whom he saw in the ordering of
Nature.

The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully
expressed than in his words:

I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things
that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the
depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy