their badness.  This state, so much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced.  It was only for a moment.  And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.  Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape.  Hence there could be no normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.

At first all was pure and delicious.  In after times when pain made him gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency, with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions.  “As I got up with the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come to disturb its charm.  After having given the morning to divers tasks which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon.  Before one o’clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one should lay hold of me before I could get away.  But when I had once passed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of the day!  Then with easier pace I went in search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and me.  She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was always new.  The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and flowers that I trod under foot,