NATURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 51 
—— 
= = SS — 
SS 
SSS 
3 
between man and the rock draws, at leneth, the 
’ oD ? ~ 
‘aptive element from its long enchantment. The orass 
seizes upon it; the tree seizes upon it; the animals 
seize upon it. All this sand, in which the rock never 
fails to end eventually, becomes permeable to the 
activity of a vast subterranean world. 
Nothing aroused in my mind a greater number of 
dreams, no spectacle threw me back more directly upon 
myself. For I, too, through some degree of poverty or 
sluggishness, I have long been rebellious like this 
sandstone, upon which, frequently, nothing can make 
an impression, or which, splitting cross-wise, yields 
qua 
ff 
but irregular, shapeless fragments and useless refuse. 
It needed History, with its weighty iron hammer, to —¥ 
disengage me from myself, to separate me from my 
own obstacles, to shatter and release me. ' 48 
i) 
i) = 
‘ 
I} 
A severe enfranchisement ! What have [not lost of @ ya 
/ 
myself, in return for the few stones I have contributed 
to the great monument of the future! Sometimes, 
doubly stricken by the past and the present, I have 
felt as if I were crumbling into pieces—what say I ?— 
into powder, into dust; and at times I have seen my- 
self, as I see the bottom of yonder quarry, a mass of 
OY 
sand and rubbish. 
TL 
TL 
) 
Nevertheless, it is through these elements, through 
an undetinable sap hidden in the bosom of the flint, 
that all-powerful Nature has worked out my renova- 
tion. With a little grass and heather binding up 
what History and the world had crushed, she has said, smilingly : 
“You creature, you are Time. Iam Nature, the everlasting” 
