In his less misanthropic moods the Rousseauist sees in wild nature not only a refuge from society, but also a suitable setting for his companionship with the ideal mate, for what the French term _la solitude à deux_. Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race And, hating no one, love but only her![208] The almost innumerable passages in the romantic movement that celebrate this Arcadian companionship in the wilderness merely continue in a sense the pastoral mood that must be as old as human nature itself. But in the past the pastoral mood has been comparatively placid. It has not been associated in any such degree with misanthropy and wildness, with nympholeptic longing and the thirst for the infinite. The scene that Chateaubriand has imagined between Chactas and Atala in the primeval forest, is surely the stormiest of Arcadias; so stormy indeed that it would have been unintelligible to Theocritus. It is not certain that it would have been intelligible to Shakespeare, who like the other Elizabethans felt at times that he too had been born in Arcadia. The Arcadian of the past was much less inclined to sink down to the subrational and to merge his personality in the landscape. Rousseau describes with a charm that has scarcely been surpassed by any of his disciples, the reveries in which he thus descends below the level of his rational self. Time, no longer broken up by the importunate intellect and its analysis, is then felt by him in its unbroken flow; the result is a sort of “eternal present that leaves no sense of emptiness.” Of such a moment of revery Rousseau says, anticipating Faust, that he “would like it to last forever.” Bergson in his conception of the _summum bonum_ as a state in which time is no longer cut up into artificial segments but is perceived in its continuous stream as a “present that endures,”[209] has done little more than repeat Rousseau. The sight and sound of water seem to have been a special aid to revery in Rousseau’s case. His accounts of the semi-dissolution of his conscious self that he enjoyed while drifting idly on the Lake of Bienne are justly celebrated. Lamartine’s soul was, like that of Rousseau, lulled by “the murmur of waters.” Nothing again is more Rousseauistic than the desire Arnold attributes to Maurice de Guérin--the desire “to be borne on forever down an enchanted stream.” That too is why certain passages of Shelley are so near in spirit to Rousseau--for example, the boat revery in “Prometheus Unbound” in which an Arcadian nature and the dream companion mingle to the strains of music in a way that is supremely romantic.[210]