Page:Elegiac Sonnets 2.pdf/132

Rh

I cannot now turn to any other pursuit that for a moment soothes my wounded mind.

"Je pris gout a cette récreation des yeux, qui dans l'infortune, repose, amuse, distrait l'esprit, et suspend le sentiment des peines."

Thus speaks the singular, the unhappy Rousseau, when in his "Promenades" he enumerates the causes that drove him from the society of men, and occasioned his pursuing with renewed avidity the study of Botany. "I was," says he, "Forcé de m'abstenir de penser, de peur de penser a mes malheurs malgré moi; forcé de contenir les restes d'une imagination riante, mais languissante, que tant d'angoisses pourroient effaroucher a la fin—"

Without any pretensions to those talents which were in him so heavily taxed with that excessive irritability, too often, if not always the attendant on