In these words Sénancour expressed his own literary faith and predicted his own destiny. His own generation overlooked him; he was not appreciated while he lived, although he was in the unhappy position of possessing no source of income but his pen. But in the days of the Romantic School he attained renown; the Romantic critics bound his simple field flowers into garlands along with the passion-flowers and roses of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. And he deserved the fame he attained. For he is one of the most remarkable authors of the Emigrant Literature-a worshipper of Nature, as becomes a pupil of Rousseau, melancholy, as befits a genuine admirer of Ossian, weary of life, as befits a contemporary of Chateaubriand. He is thoroughly modern in his theories on religion, morality, education, and the position of women in society; he is the regular German Romanticist in his sentimentality, his indolence, and his dread of contact with reality, as if it were something that would burn him; and he is the French Romanticist in his mixture of liberal-mindedness with excessive scrupulosity and of enthusiasm with refined sensuousness, a combination which reappears in French literature twenty years later in Sainte-Beuve's _Joseph Delorme_. Everything stamps him as a herald or forerunner of the long train of greater intellects who at this moment begin their progress through the century; his weak voice announces them and he prepares their way. [1] Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90. VI NODIER Simultaneously with _Obermann_ there appeared in the French book market a little romance which was a product of intellectual tendencies akin to those of Sénancour. Though its author too is a forerunner of greater men than himself, his remarkable and versatile talent, his sense of the fantastic (exceptionally strong for a French author), and his courage in striking out new paths, make of him not a mere precursor but a pioneeer. This writer was Charles Nodier, and the name of his book, _Le Peintre de Saltzbourg_.