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She belongs to that class of tourists so amusingly drawn by Toepffer. Character: naive conceit. Country: France. Standard of life: fashion. Some cleverness but no sense of reality, no understanding of nature, no consciousness of the manifold diversities of the world and of the right of life to be what it is, and to follow its own way and not ours.
The poetical flaneurs of Toepffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends and passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at once a reproach and a lesson. We read too much!
Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and Protestant solidity was beginning to find inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of Toepffer.
It was he who founded traveling on foot before Toepffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure.
Reverie is the Sunday of thought; and who knows which is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious tension of the week, or the life-giving repose of the Sabbath? The flanerie so exquisitely glorified and sung by Toepffer is not only delicious, but useful.
Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Toepffer, to Amiel himself: "C'est ainsi qu'on ecrit dans les litteratures qui n'ont point de capitale, de quartier general classique, ou d'Academie; c'est ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Americain, ou meme un Anglais, use a son gre de sa langue.
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