Little Poems in Prose

munion. He who easily weds himself to the crowd becomes acquainted with feverish en- joyments, of which the egotist, closed up like a strong-box, and the idle man, shut up in his shell like a mollusc, are eternally deprived. He adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys, and all the miseries which chance brings under his notice. What men call love is very small, very re- stricted, very weak compared with this ineffa- ble orgy, this holy prostitution of the soul, which gives itself altogether, all its poetry, all its good will, to every unexpected object, to the stranger who passes by. It is sometimes well to teach the happy of this world, were it only to humiliate for a mo- ment their foolish pride, that there are pleas- ures superior to theirs, pleasures more vast and more refined. Those who found colleges, who teach peoples, missionary priests exiled to the end of the earth, without doubt know something of these mysterious intoxications, and in the bosom of the vast family which their genius has made for themselves, they must sometimes laugh at those who compassionate them for their troubled fortune and for their life so chaste.