The running waters I hear from my retreat offer to my agitated mind objects that fill it with a gentle distraction, and make me feel my existence with pleasure, without any sight of distant objects drawing me away from it. This feeling of existence, stripped of every other affection, is in itself a precious state of contentment and peace, and that alone would make this existence dear and desirable to one who could cast off all the carnal and earthly sensations that constantly come to disturb it. But most men, agitated by continual passions, know little of this state, and having enjoyed it only imperfectly and for a few moments, retain only an obscure and confused idea of it, which does not let them feel its charm. It is not enough to consider these effects in general to savor their sweetness; one must follow them in their detail and their successive circumstances. One would then see that true happiness consists in enjoying what is, and not in a licentious pleasure that almost always corrupts it.

When evening approached, I would come down from the island's heights and gladly go sit by the lakeshore, on the strand, in some hidden refuge; there the sound of the waves and the stir of the water, fixing my senses by a continuous motion, chased from my soul any other agitation, and plunged it into a delicious reverie in which night often overtook me without my noticing. Thus I passed my days amid plants and flowers, wandering from place to place, sitting here and there in an arbitrary manner, sometimes thinking, sometimes thinking of nothing. All that is stirred cannot last; man cannot remain perpetually in this reverie; he must either begin again or end.

I believed I noticed, examining my lot carefully, that I had known true happiness only at the time when, recalling my early daydreams, I compared them with my present joys. There is no man who can savor happiness and life more than I do, when in my reveries I carry myself back to the seasons of my youth. We are born, so to speak, twice: once to exist, and once again to live. I count in my life only the time when I felt it. Rare is the man who can boast of that full and pure sensation.

O happy lake! your waves recall to me the sweetest hours of my life, which I shall always remember, from the depths of my exile, your shores and your smiling countryside. If I have known the pleasures of friendship, it was beside you that I knew them. What dear meetings, what charming walks, what delicious days spent on your banks or in your islands! Some of their memory moves me, their loss tears me apart; others, whose regret, mixed with a sweet bitterness, is what remains to me most dear and precious. How I would wish, sensitive soul, to see again for a single day those cherished hours, were it only in dream, to weep with joy and to recall how sweet they were! But alas, all is finished for me of what could sweeten the bitter draught I drink through the rest of my days.

The feeling of existence, stripped of every other affection, is a precious state of contentment and peace, which would make this existence dear and desirable to one who could cast off all the earthly sensations that constantly disturb it. In the reveries of solitude, I abandon myself to the sweetness of that state. The forgetting of past pains is easy when one does not foresee new ones; and the thought of the misfortune awaiting me does not prevent me from savoring with delight the present moments. I believe most men, agitated by continual passions, know little of this state, and having enjoyed it only imperfectly and briefly, retain only an obscure and confused idea of it that does not let them feel its charm.

If there is a state where the soul finds a footing solid enough to rest there entirely and gather there its whole being, without needing to recall the past or press on into the future; where time is nothing to it, where the present lasts forever without, however, marking itself and without any trace of succession; where, as long as this state lasts, he who is in it can call himself happy with a happiness sufficient, perfect and full: such, I believe, is the state in which I often found myself on the island of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, lying in the boat, drifting with the water, or seated on the stirred shores of the lake, or elsewhere, beside a fair river, or a brook murmuring over the gravel. In such a state, the source of all pleasures is within ourselves; but to feel it, the heart of man must not still be agitated, nor must he covet that state; he must have pleasures that do not draw him from it, but that, on the contrary, serve to maintain him in it.