IN LITERATURE 7 



nature is as fresh, and her pen as forcible, as in <c Le 

 Meunier d'Angibault " or " La Petite Fadette." Yet 

 even George Sand in her inimitable descriptions gives 

 us the idea of an enthusiastic and emotional amateur 

 looking at the beauties of nature through an aesthetic 

 medium, as she might admire them on the canvas of a 

 Corot or Jules Breton. You see the old chateau lost 

 among the woods and rocks, tenanted now by the 

 family of the farmer who has succeeded to its ancient 

 lords. You see the lonely mill among the meadows 

 and the water-courses, among osier-beds and clumps of 

 the drooping alders and sedges, swarming with the 

 water-hens. You are wrought insensibly into easy 

 sympathy with the hopes and hardships, the griefs and 

 the joys, of the hard-working people who have their 

 homes there. You are made to fancy that retreat 

 among such soothing influences would be more tran- 

 quillising to the jaded spirit, and quite as satisfactory 

 in the long run to the blase hermit, as the gloom and 

 asceticism of the mediaeval convent ; and that a short 

 sojourn in summer would be no disagreeable variety 

 even to men and women of the world, though the fare 

 might be simple and the post irregular. But the very 

 longings with which you are inspired must arise from 

 some passing impulse of misanthropy. You are to 

 court solitude from an ephemeral passion for it, and 

 you are to woo peaceful nature in a dead calm of 

 seclusion. You are to change your every habit, and 

 divorce yourself from your every-day routine. You 

 are to abandon the congenial but demoralising society 



