Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in men.

He liked rivulets better than rivers.

He could not bear the sight of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him with melancholy.

The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no attraction for him.

He could steep himself in nature without climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her.