We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His thought is, as
it were, perpetually at church; it is perpetually devising trials and
penances for itself. Hence the air of scruple and anxiety which
characterizes it even in its bolder flights. Moral energy, balanced by a
disquieting delicacy of fibre; a fine organization marred, so to speak,
by low health, such is the impression it makes upon us. Is it reproach
or praise to say of Vinet's mind that it seems to one a force
perpetually reacting upon itself? A warmer and more self-forgetful
manner; more muscles, as it were, around the nerves, more circles of
intellectual and historical life around the individual circle, these are
what Vinet, of all writers perhaps the one who makes us _think_ most, is
still lacking in. Less _reflexivity_ and more plasticity, the eye more
on the object, would raise the style of Vinet, so rich in substance, so
nervous, so full of ideas, and variety, into a grand style. Vinet, to
sum up, is conscience personified, as man and as writer. Happy the
literature and the society which is able to count at one time two or
three like him, if not equal to him!
November 10, 1852.--How much have we not to learn from the Greeks, those
immortal ancestors of ours! And how much better they solved their
problem than we have solved ours.
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