When the inevitable reaction set in, it took the form of a debauch of sentimentalism. The poetry of real passion came back into literature and people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a frivolous game played for the gratification of lust, but a divine rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,--a part of that nature to which the world was now resolved to return,--it was sacred, and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts and cities. It was, however, the passionate eloquence of Rousseau which first gave to this contrast a revolutionary significance, and it was Rousseau who first stirred the reading world with a woeful tale of lovers separated by the prejudices of caste. In 'The New Heloise' it is the lady who is the aristocrat. Julie d'Etange, the daughter of a baron, wishes to marry the untitled St. Preux, to whom in a transport of passion she has yielded up her honor. But the Baron d'Etange is an implacable stickler for rank and she is a dutiful daughter; whence her marriage to the elderly infidel, Wolmar, and the well-known moral ending of the novel. The thought that concerns us here is best expressed by the enlightened English peer, Lord B., who thus expostulates with Baron d'Etange: