When one avoids his fellow beings for the purpose of escaping the pervasive opposition and rebuke their presence administers to his egotistic feelings, every step of removal is an injury. Lowell has wisely remarked:"One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keeps himself clear of their weaknesses; he is not so truly withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to share their strength." Then solitude becomes the hot-house of vice. Vices which on the highway were shrubs here become trees, and even exotics are curiously pampered. The peculiarities of any caste of men existing in marked isolation from neighboring humanity, are apt to be a haughty selfishness and conceit. They acquire the habit of Pharisaic exclusiveness, and hold the rights of mankind in abeyance to the interests of their clique. Thus a priest may think less of God and truth than of the ecclesiastical establishment with which he identifies himself. The result, of course, is wholly different when the lonely man spends his thoughts and passions on disinterested principles and plans, themes connected with universal truth and good. The history of monastic ages and of mystical sects is certainly as full of warnings as of examples. Their prevailing influence is to withdraw attention from the general and fasten it on the particular, to absorb the individual in himself, and make him oblivious of the public. They forget that the laws which bind the molecules into wholes have a sovereign importance immensely beyond the molecules. too But our chief dangers lie in the opposite quarter, much living in a throng, frittering publicity, garrulous disclosures and uneasy comparisons. Our pining is not after loneliness, but after the rush and glitter of crowds. If left to ourselves, we sigh in our desertion, and think it were far happier to be in the throng. But why do we not see that happiness resides in the mind, and is no gift of place? Diocletian and Amurath voluntarily abdicated their thrones, and withdrew into private life, sick of the revolting discoveries they had made, overwearied by the pompous miseries they had found. Charles the Fifth exchanged his kingdom for a cell, and deemed himself the gainer. Philip the Third on his death-bed was heard to sigh, "O that I had never reigned; that I had rather been the poorest man!" Oliver Cromwell declared in one of his speeches, "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have been glad to have lived under my wood-side, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertook such a government as this." Colbert, the great minister of Louis the Fourteenth, who was proud and fond of his master, but prouder and fonder of his country, was broken-hearted by the alienation of the ungrateful egotist he had served too well, and at the sight of the distress of the people whom he had toiled so hard to shield and bless. On his death-bed he refused to hear the letter his penitent master sent. "I wish to hear no more of the king. It is to the King of kings that I have now to answer. Had I done for God what I have done for this man, I should be saved ten times over; and now I know not what will become of me." Worst injustice of all, the people were as ungrateful as the king. They looked on Colbert as the author of their hardships, instead of recognizing in him their chief friend and benefactor. The great minister was buried secretly by night, for fear the rabble would tear his body from the bier! The belief that the men of the greatest celebrity are the happiest men, is the inveterate fallacy of shallow minds. The reverse rather is the truth. The fate of Cæsar is a symbol of the fortune of genius; the crown on the brow implies the dagger in the heart. To be persecuted with dislike makes the man of deep sympathetic soul unhappy. And certainly this is the common fate of the great man. Envy scowls at him, and hatred reeks around him. His illustrious genius rebukes littleness, his conspicuous place stirs the venom of obscure ambition, his incorruptible honesty enrages unprincipled selfishness, and they seek revenge. Papinian, the peerless builder of the Roman Law, who, according to Cujacius, "was the first of all lawyers who have been or are to be, whom no one ever surpassed in legal knowl edge, and no one ever will equal," became unpopular, and was beheaded by Caracalla for his ability and his integrity. Looking over the tragic history of the world thus far, it is obvious that greatness and happiness have rarely been united. "Inquire," says Lavater, "after the sufferings of great men, and you will learn why they are great." In his Dialogue between Nature and a Soul, Leopardi makes the soul refuse the offer of the highest gifts of genius, on account of the inevitable suffering connected with them. Yet it will ever be the characteristic of choice souls to prefer the mournful nobility of the prerogatives of genius, with all their accompanying trials, to jollity and mirth on a more vulgar level. In their view pleasure may be a rose, but wisdom is a ruby. With a thrill of divine valor they affirm that the duty to be noble takes precedence of the right to be happy. Unquestionably the moral regimen of the hermitage is more appropriate for our case than that of the drawingroom. The frittering multitude of interests and influences is so great, that an economizing seclusion and defence of the soul is one of our greatest needs. The truth that the world is too much with us, is fitter to furnish exhortations to us than the other truth, that it is not good for man to be alone. The word trivial, in its etymological origin, is loaded with a forcible lesson. It is derived from the word trivium, which denotes the meeting-place of three roads; a point where idlers spent their time, loitering to see what passed, and to discuss the worthless items and gossip of the day. How much weightier are the suggestions of the word solitude! The Uses of Solitude. Two men, most emphatically, are alone; the worst man and the best. Judas, hugging the thirty pieces of silver, or throwing them down and retiring to hang himself, is alone; and Jesus, sitting by the wayside on Jacob's well, with meat to eat that the world knows not of, or going apart into a mountain to pray, is alone. When : ever we feel deserted it is well to trace the cause of the feeling; learn whether the experience be the result of a fault, of a merit, or of some neutral quality unfitting us. for such fellowship as would otherwise be ours. The first improvement of our loneliness is to analyze its cause and meaning, see what kind of solitude we are in, and what mode of treatment will be best adapted to the case. These preliminary steps taken, the next duty is to devise the fittest remedies for whatever is painful or wrong in our condition, and endeavor to win the richest compensations from it. A very different regimen should be prescribed for one suffering in the solitude of guilt from that applied to one suffering in the solitude of grief. The former needs the processes of penitence, atonement, reformation the latter, the ministrations of faith, love, cheerful communion, useful activity. Much of the bitterest loneliness in the world arises from an exorbitant and morbid self-regard, the importunate presence of self in attention. Hawthorne's story of the Bosom Serpent is a terrible illustration. There is a whole class of solitaries simply from shyness, bashful men like Gray and Cowper, the poets, and Cavendish, the great chemist. A much larger class affect seclusion in consequence of pride. The misfortune of both these classes of sensitive shrinkers is the same, an inability to escape the consciousness of their own personalities as related to the opinions of other people. It is not mere self-consciousness that troubles the trembling sensitive; it is that self-consciousness imaginatively transferred to another, and exposed to all the variations of the supposititious opinions there. The endless multiplicity of competition in modern society, at every point a prize, at every point a glass, — tends to force us inordinately on our own notice. If we could but gaze at the prize alone, and break or blink the glass! But unfortunately mirrors prove more fascinating than prizes, and most persons are intent on themselves. No other article of domestic furniture has been so disproportionately multiplied in modern upholstery as the looking-glass. Parlors, dining-rooms, entries, dormitories, even ladies' fans and gentlemen's hats, are lined with looking-glasses. And, not content with this, a recent American newspaper contained the announcement, in a description of several sumptuous banquets, that the host in each instance furnished a photographic likeness of himself, a gift placed in the plate of every guest. The reporter thinks it a most delicate attention, and hopes that the generous givers of dinner-parties will follow the beautiful example and make it a custom! Thackeray, with probing truth, in the vignette to his Vanity Fair, depicts the representative character, stretched at full length, neglecting alike the petty and the sublime objects about him, — puppet, crucifix, church, and sky,— with a melancholy air studying his own lugubrious face in a mirror which he holds in his hand. Yes, this is the malady of the age, -an age of Narcissuses. The curative desideratum is devotion to a divine end, disinterested enthusiasm. Give the victim that, and he will fling off his incubus, his morbid consciousness of self will disappear in a wholesome consciousness of objects. Sometimes the unhappy subject of this malady, attempting to cure himself by retreating from the crowd where his self-consciousness is disagreeably stimulated, only aggravates the cause in solitude. For he still continues to deal chiefly with his own personality and its private affairs; and he who does this will find that egotism and its penalties may be more exasperated in the hermitage than in the hall. He must put self in the background, refuse to think of it, escape the haunting torment, by an absorbing occupation with redemptive objects and truths. Petrarch one of the most eloquent missionaries of solitude - has described this untoward experience in his famous sonnet beginning, "O cameretta che già fosti un porto." He writes: But e'en than solitude and rest, I flee More from myself and melancholy thought, In whose vain quest my soul has heavenward flown. Strange though it sound, for refuge have I sought, — That kind of moral solitude which constitutes a pain |