“No day passes,” he wrote in the very year in which he died, “in which I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and when I may say in a true sense that I lived.  I may almost say, like the prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the country, ’I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but seven of them.’  But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I 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 them would instantly settle on his arms or his head.  The bees, too, gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life was surrounded with gentle companionship.  He always began the day with the sun, walking on the high ridge