incessantly calling for him with piteous lowings. The ox-herd will tell you: There is a pair of oxen done for! his _brother_ is dead, and this one will work no more. He ought to be fattened for killing; but we cannot get him to eat, and in a short time he will have starved himself to death."[322] How faithful and close it is, this contact of George Sand with country things, with the life of nature in its vast plenitude and pathos! And always in the end the human interest, as is right, emerges and predominates. What is the central figure in the fresh and calm rural world of George Sand? It is the peasant. And what is the peasant? He is France, life, the future. And this is the strength of George Sand, and of her second movement, after the first movement of energy and revolt was over, towards nature and beauty, towards the country, towards primitive life, the peasant. She regarded nature and beauty, not with the selfish and solitary joy of the artist who but seeks to appropriate them for his own purposes, she regarded them as a treasure of immense and hitherto unknown application, as a vast power of healing and delight for all, and for the peasant first and foremost. Yes she cries, the simple life is the true one! but the peasant, the great organ of that life, "the minister in that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace," the peasant is not doomed to toil and moil in it forever, overdone and unawakened, like Holbein's laborer, and to have for his best comfort the thought that death will set him free. _Non, nous n'avons plus affaire à la mort, mais à la vie._[323] "Our business henceforth is not with death, but with life." Joy is the great lifter of men, the great unfolder. _Il faut que la vie soit bonne afin qu'elle soit féconde._ "For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a blessing":--