When I wished to summon to my memory the place where I had made those reflections, I found no better-chosen dwelling than the Isle of Poplars in the lake of Bienne, at the foot of the Jura, on the lands of Neuchâtel. I know of no more sweetly secluded house, and I found myself there so happy at once that I had not passed two days there before making it the subject of all my reveries. The gentle, peaceful months of spring and summer passed there in days so delightful, and I lived them in a manner so true to what I had always loved, that if chance and men had not interrupted my life, I believe I would have ended my days there without ever perceiving that they had had an end. But I must summarize in a few words the substance of that reverie, whose details would fill a whole book. The flux and reflux of that water, its continuous sound reinforced at intervals, striking at every instant my ear and my eyes, supplied the inner movements that the feeling of my own existence extinguished in me, and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without admitting any other thought. From time to time there arose from that delicious meditation some faint and light thoughts on the instability of this world, source of so many ills that overwhelm us, and on the strangeness of our lot, which mocks what we cherish and scorns what we desire. That nascent idea soon dissolved; there remained of it all only the sentiment of our own existence, stripped of every other affection; and it is in that sentiment that the durable felicity whose savour he knows is anchored. But how can one express what passes in the souls of those who feel it? Is all well or ill in this world? Is life a good or an evil? The sensation of existence, stripped of every other affection, is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace, and that alone would be worth to sensitive and gentle souls that sweetness of living which they find there. There one enjoys one's whole being; one lives entirely; and time, of which one no longer takes account, is as if it did not exist. There is nothing more. How far the man who thinks is from the man who enjoys! The feeling of existence, stripped of all other affection, is in itself a precious state of contentment and peace, and he who feels it would be alone happy if he could always savour it. But he tastes it only rarely, and the insouciance of the man who has known how to fill his life well is the source of it. How is one to obtain such a reverie? One must begin by freeing oneself from every desire. As long as man's desire is satisfied, he is well; but it is at the same time false that enjoyment is lasting. The man who dreams thus does not know what he does; he is glad to exist; he has no need even to recall the past or to think of the future; he enjoys the present, and the present is for him everything. The foreboding and fear of ills to come torment us more than the ills themselves, and we do ourselves far more pain through imagination than reality could ever cause us. One must suspend the movement of the soul, not by leaving it idle and folded upon itself, but by filling it with an object that gently attaches it without wearying it. This is what the uniform and continuous movement of the waters produces, which lulls the spirit as it lulls the body, and which, extinguishing all thought of duration, sets the soul in a state where it feels itself exist without thinking. He who, in the state in which I describe myself as having been, could maintain himself there would perhaps escape the grief and the tedium that beset us, and that reflection only sharpens. All the unhappiness of men comes, if I am not mistaken, from their not dwelling quietly in their rooms, and from their not having known how to stop their course at the just term which their nature and their needs have fixed. He who wishes to recognize in nature the happiness possible to man must renounce the vanity and the forebodings that ruin him; he must, like me, know how to be happy with the single feeling that he exists, and enjoy the present moment without troubling himself either about the past or about what is to come.