should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went
out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her
and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in
the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I
helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not in
any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a
single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in
temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who
has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than
he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among
the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many
men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.

All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that
they would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he
would, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of