NATURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL 
51 
between man and the rock draws, at length, the 
captive element from its long enchantment. The grass 
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 
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. 
A severe enfranchisement! What have I not lost of 
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 
sand and rubbish. 
Nevertheless, it is through these elements, througli 
an undefinable 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. I am Nature, the everlasting.” 
BMP' 
