"
The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread freshness
and joy around her. I breakfasted, read the paper, and here I am. The
ladies of the _pension_ are still under the horizon. I pity them for the
loss of two or three delightful hours.
Eleven o'clock.--Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my
feet. In the garden children's voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz
on "Hegel's Logic," and have run through a few articles in the
Reviews.... The limitation of the French mind consists in the
insufficiency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to
translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without changing the
accent. The hospitality of French manners is not completed by a real
hospitality of thought.... My nature is just the opposite. I am
individual in the presence of men, objective in the presence of things.
I attach myself to the object, and absorb myself in it; I detach myself
from subjects [_i.e._. persons], and hold myself on my guard against
them. I feel myself different from the mass of men, and akin to the
great whole of nature. My way of asserting myself is in cherishing this
sense of sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, and
in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that is imitative and
artificial inspires me with a secret repulsion, while the smallest true
and spontaneous existence (plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me.
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