It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense gratified and fascinated.

Caressing and undivided affection within doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude, freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the conditions of Rousseau's ideal state.

"If my happiness," he says, in language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than the very feeling itself?
I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me.

It was not in any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than he is rare.

The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.
All innocent and amiable things moved him.