As the mountain heaves and cracks, these vapory masses are seamed with
fire, as if they felt and answered the dumb agony that is struggling for
utterance below. Just such flashes of eager sympathetic fire break
continually from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once and
the warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be the crater and
all Europe to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough elsewhere of that
want of faith in the existing order which made the Revolution
inevitable,--even so shallow an observer as Horace Walpole could forebode
it so early as 1765,--but Rousseau more than all others is the
unconscious expression of the groping after something radically new, the
instinct for a change that should be organic and pervade every fibre of
the social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to the
jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than to the
sombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly kind. Yet, for good
or evil, the latter was the father of modern democracy, and with out him
our Declaration of Independence would have wanted some of those sentences
in which the immemorial longings of the poor and the dreams of solitary
enthusiasts were at last affirmed as axioms in the manifesto of a nation,
so that all the world might hear.
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