It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,” a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The =nature-sense= on the one hand, =sentimentality= on the other, are the new elements in the love of the period of Héloïse and Werther. In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time was full. =It was love in a grander style= than people were then accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his own life. “Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves? In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a higher law, before which all are equal.”[141] The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And he observes both, nature and love, =with feeling=. The _sensibilité de l’âme_ finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight, of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears. “Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine had only to add self-mockery.”[142]