48 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 



of solitude, and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but 

 slowly and with unaccustomed ear, like one who shaD have been some 

 time dead, and have returned from the other world. 



In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable 

 History, I had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, 

 with a heart less tender than ardent. At a later period, when 

 residing in the suburb of Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. 

 I watched with interest my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so 

 sensible every evening of the joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly 

 grateful. How much more at Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever 

 powerful and prolific, seeing the herbage shoot upward hour after 

 hour, and all animal life multiplying around me, ought I not, I too, 

 to expand and revive with this new sentiment ! 



If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and 

 broken the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book 

 which we frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France," 

 by Toussenel, a charming and felicitous transition from the thought 

 of country to that of nature. 



So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch, 

 his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there 

 were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover 



all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the 

 Gallic sense, the French esprit, the very soul of our fatherland. 



The formulae of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its 



