In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental and erotic pastorals.  He opened up again for his country the taste for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and, above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality and false taste.

The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of previous periods of literature.

His Confessions opened not only the eyes of France, but the heart.

A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of Geneva.  As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the country.

He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, forgetting the time.  ’Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded themselves majestically before my eyes.  I gloated over the beautiful spectacle while the sun was setting.  At last, too late, I saw that the city gates were shut.’

From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men.  In the Fourth Book of the Confessions he says, speaking of 1732: 

’A view of the Lake of Geneva and its beautiful banks has had even in my idea a particular attraction that I cannot describe, not arising merely from the beauty of the prospect, but something, I know not what, more interesting which affects and softens me.  ’Every time I have approached the Vaudois country, I have experienced an impression composed of the remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who was born there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de Wulson, who had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys I had made there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, more powerfully attractive than all the rest.  When that ardent desire for a life of happiness and tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for which I was born) inflames my mind, ’tis ever to the country of Vaud, near the lake, on those charming plains, that imagination leads me.  An orchard on the banks of that lake, and no other, is absolutely necessary; a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow, and a little boat; nor could I enjoy perfect happiness on earth without these concomitants....  On my way to Vevey I gave myself up to the soft melancholy ...  I sighed and wept like a child.’

He clung to Nature, and most of all when surrounded by human beings; a morbid impulse to flee from them was always present as a negative element in the background of his love for her.  His Fifth Reverie, the most beautiful one, shews this.

He had gone to the Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne.  So far as he knew, no other traveller had paid any attention to the place; but that did not disturb his confidence in his own taste.