reasonable and modest enjoyment, if the object for their admiration be
well pointed out to them. Rousseau needed no such instruction. To some
extent he furnished it to the modern world. The genuineness of his love
of nature is partly shown by the fact that she was as dear to him in her
simpler as in her grander aspects. The grass filled him with delight as
truly as the mountain-peak; indeed, he felt contempt for those who look
afar for the beauty that is all about us, and his admiration was not
reserved for the unusual. Nor did he fill his pages with description. It
is in his autobiographical writings and in reference to its effect on
himself that he most often mentions natural scenery. Recognizing
instinctively that the principal subjects of language are thought and
action, as the chief interests of painting are form and color, this
writer so keenly alive to natural beauty is guiltless of word painting.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712. His
mother, the daughter of a Protestant minister, died at his birth. His
father, a clockmaker by trade, a man of eccentric disposition, had
little real control over the boy, and, moreover, soon moved away from
the city on account of a quarrel with its government, leaving his son
behind him. Jean Jacques was first put under the care of a minister in a
neighboring village; then passed two or three years with an uncle in the
town. At the age of eleven he was sent to a notary's office, whence he
was dismissed for dullness and inaptitude. He was next apprenticed to an
engraver, a man of violent temper, who by his cruelty brought out the
meanness inherent in the boy's weak nature. Rousseau had not been
incapable of generosity; perhaps he never quite became so. But, with a
cowardly temperament, he especially needed firm kindness and judicious
reproof, and these he did not receive. He took to pilfering from his
master, who, in return, used to beat him. Rousseau's thefts were, in
fact, not very considerable,--apples from the larder, graving tools from