up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim.  His dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned version of the Bible story.  Though it has Rousseau’s usual fine sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked Voltaire’s many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the profound difference between the pair.  Contrast with Voltaire’s shrill cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:—­“Though the consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these gentlemen no grudge.  I am aware that their object was not to do me any harm, but only to reach ends of their own.  I know that towards me they have neither liking nor hate.  I was found in their way, like a pebble that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it.  They ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.

Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active resentments.  The world was not real enough to him for this.  A throng of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of more actual impression.  “It is amazing,” he wrote, “with what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be.  In proportion as the anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment after it has arrived.  My cruel imagination, which torments itself incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which have gone.  I exhaust disaster beforehand.  The more I have suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness.  “I concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about the offender.  I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten straightway.”  Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called his natural ingratitude.  Kindness was not much more vividly understood by him than malice.  It was only one form of the troublesome interposition