Ubc Xa^ing ©ut ot a iparti or Bstate 55 



changed sighs of love, which yielded to accents 

 of pleasure and joy. 



"I walked gently in an alley of young plane trees 

 which I planted a few years since. Above all the 

 vague incomplete impressions and images which were 

 born of the presence of the objects and my moods, 

 hovered this feeling of the infinite which bears us 

 onward sometimes towards a world superior to phe- 

 nomena, towards this world of realities which links 

 itself to God, as the first and only reality. It 

 seems in this condition when all sensations with- 

 out and within are calm and happy, as if there 

 were a peculiar sense appropriate to heavenly things, 

 which, wrapped up in the actual fashion of our 

 existence, is destined perhaps to develop itself one 

 day when the soul shall have quitted its mortal 

 husk." 



It was men of a similar type, in this respect, to Maine 

 de Biran who earlier, back in the seventeenth century, 

 felt the impulse of a rising desire for free landscape 

 gardening, and developed an instinct for the enjoyment 

 in nature of something higher than melancholy or 

 terror or gaiety or what is understood ordinarily as 

 feeling. There were men even in those days who like 

 Fenelon, the spiritual ancestor and acknowledged 

 master of de Biran, would write in fiat Versailles 

 what is said to be the first ode of praise of distant 

 mountain tops; who like Racine would murmur in 

 the alleys of the park: 



