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Rh And so while everywhere young hearts were yearning to do him homage, Rousseau himself, shrinking from contact with his kind, was gnawed, cankered by that worst disease of the mind, the dreadful horror of imagining an enemy in everyone who sought to approach him. Perhaps, while outside the ardent girl waited eagerly to tell the author of the Nouvelle Héloïse what an unpayable debt she owed him, the man, whose burning thoughts were now alive within her, hid himself like some dumb wounded animal. He did not know, alas! that at his door, vainly knocking for admittance, stood his very own daughter (for we are not only born in the flesh but in the spirit), that there, young and strong, beautiful and impassioned with thought, there waited one ready to render back to him in his old age the spiritual glow he had once emitted—he did not know—and, with only a wall between, they crossed each other unseen, never to meet on earth. But while the poor, time-battered body of the man was dragging out the few last years of abject wretchedness, his spirit had gone forth from him, swaying thousands of minds, as the vivifying west wind stirs the boughs of a vernal forest. Like Jubal—the inventor of the lyre—in George Eliot's fine conception, who dies broken-hearted by the wayside while the people pass on triumphantly chaunting his praises, Rousseau, too, was miserably perishing, even while his thought was becoming a living force which

In 1776 and also in 1777, the year preceding that of both Voltaire's and Rousseau's death, Madame Roland was intently studying the latter's works, and continually