Sometimes seeking the end of a line which I have constructed
I find in a nook of the woods the word which had escaped me....
Behold the solid pleasures of a constructor of verses, the friend of useful reveries. Reporters have recently questioned our men of letters as to how they "employ their vacations."... They have replied in prose by confidences quite like those which Boileau addressed in verse to M. Lamoignon, advocate general.
But at Hautile, Boileau sometimes stopped to dream and rhyme; then, he "jestingly allured the too eager fish"; or, he "made war on the inhabitants of the air"; and he tasted, on returning from the chase, the pleasure of an "agreeable and rustic" repast.
So, when he was about to leave the country, he expressed the ordinary wish of every citizen and of every poet obliged to return to Paris:
Oh, fortunate sojourn! Oh, fields beloved of heaven!
Why, strolling forever through your delicious prairies,
Can I not fix my wandering course here
And, known by you alone, forget the world outside?
Charming verses, of which La Fontaine would not have been ashamed.