CHIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

THE SOLITUDES OF NATURE.

Gregariousness and Solitariness.

Ar the first glance every form of being appears to be (social, all the world gregarious. The trees interlace their branches and wave their tops in multitudinous union; from the equator to the poles the waves shoulder their fellows, glistening with innumerable smiles; whole orchards of apple-blossoms blush in correspondence; in regiments the ranks of corn laugh on the slopes; ponds of lilies uncover their bosoms to the moon; meadows of grass-blades bend before the breeze; and the barley rustles millions of beards together on the lea. Shoals of herring solidify acres of the sea with moving life. Infinitudes of phosphorescent organisms, covering the surface of the deep, turn its heaving field of darkness into a sheet of fire. There are ant-hills, animated cities whose inhabitants outnumber Jeddo and Pekin. Villages of beavers build in company. Shaggy hosts of bisons shake the globe with the dull thunder of their tread. Herds of

antelopes are seen crowding the entire horizon with their graceful forms. The naturalist in the tropics sometimes beholds clouds of gorgeous butterflies, miles in width, flying past him overhead all day. Captain Flinders saw, on the coast of Van Diemen's Land, a flight of sooty petrels, in a stream, which, as he calculated, contained a hundred millions. Audubon, while crossing the Kentucky Barrens, in eighteen hundred and thirteen, journeyed for three days beneath a flock of passenger-pigeons, which, according to his careful estimate, formed an oblong square a mile in breadth and a hundred and eighty miles

in length, and included more than a billion of birds. Moving firmaments of locusts hide the heaven and darken the earth. And what mathematics will compute the sum of the insects that toil in the erection of a coral reef?

Everywhere, then, we see nature collecting her products, -sands on the shore, leaves in the wood, fields of flowers, aggregations of mountains, firmaments of stars, swarms of insects, flocks of birds, herds of beasts, crowds of persons. Life would thus seem to be attractive, the enemy of isolation, huddling its subjects into social closeness, from heaps of mites to tribes of men. But, after all, these phenomena are exceptional, and the inferences delusive. There is more loneliness in life than there is communion. The solitudes of the world out-measure its societies. If consciousness sometimes draws, it has its pole of repulsion as well; and much of that which looks like fellowship is really but an amassment of separations. What sociality is there in compact leagues of animalculæ? Each one, shut in his incommunicative cell, might as well have the solar system to himself. The higher we look on the scale of strength and individuality, the more isolated we see that the nature and habits of creatures are. The eagle chooses his eyrie in the bleakest solitude; the condor affects the deserted empyrean; the leopard prowls through the jungle by himself; the lion has a lonely lair. So with men. While savages, like the Hottentots, gibber in their kraals, and, among civilized nations, the dissipated and the frivolous collect in clubs and assemblies, dreading to be left in seclusion, — the poet loves his solitary walk, the saint retreats to be closeted with God, and the philosopher wraps himself in immensity.

Preparatory to fixing attention on the various forms of the loneliness of human life, a contemplation of some of the gigantic solitudes of nature may envelop the soul in a befitting atmosphere of sentiment

The Solitude of the Desert.

As we advance into the solitude of the desert, not an animal, not an insect, breaks the perfect silence; not a tree or a shrub varies the interminable monotony of sand. Over the arid and level floor you may sweep the circumference of vision with a glass, and not behold a moving speck. Only when, here and there, a bleached skeleton peers out of the drift, Solitude seems to find a speechless voice in death, and mutely to proclaim its sway. At noon, in the glaring furnace, the eye faints to see the air incessantly quiver with heat; and night, when it comes, broods, chill and still, under the low-arched sky, sparkling with magnified stars.

The Solitude of the Prairie.

THE solitude of the prairie is wonderful. Day after day, from morning till evening, the traveller journeys forward, wearing the horizon as a girdle, without seeming to change his spot; for the immense circuit of which he is the centre appears to move with him. An ocean of grass around, an immitigable gulf of azure above, he feels as if he stood on the top of the world, the circular, sharp-cut level of an inverted cone, upon which the bulging dome of heaven shuts down in accurate adjustment. He looks around the unvarying wilderness of verdure, and it seems as if the whole universe were that, and there were nothing beside.

The Solitude of the Ocean.

familiar with How melan

THOUGH Civilized man has grown more the ocean, it is none the less a solitude. choly is its ceaseless wash, how lonely its perpetual swing, without a comrade in its convulsion or its calm! How, beneath the immense stoop of naked sky, within the blue walls of air, in illimitable fluctuation, it stretches

away from the stagnation of the weedy gulf, in one direction, to where winter locks its moaning billows in silence to the polar cliffs; in the other direction, to where its cataracts of surf crash on the Indian coast. Everywhere, out of sight of land, its spirit and expression are solitary, awful, scornfully exclusive of sympathy. Perched alone on the mast-head, gazing on the unbroken horizon, how inexpressibly little a man feels himself to be! Whether he contemplates the unity of the ship, frail speck on the fearful abyss, the unity of the overarching heaven, the unity of weltering desolation around, or the unity of mystery enveloping all, it awakens an appalling sense of lonesomeness.

The Solitude of the Pole.

THE most dense and dreary of physical solitudes is that of the polar realm. Now, with the cracking in splits of the frozen fields, the falling of ice-cliffs, the grinding of floes, the shrieks of the gale, one would imagine heaven and earth were going to pieces in the uproar. Again, the elemental strife at rest, the mariner treads his deck, or wanders inland, where the total life of the globe appears suspended, and a silence, oppressive as if Nature held her breath, prevails. Occasionally a single walrus crawls out in the cold-gleaming sunlight, and vainly looks around the horizon for a living fellow; the dwindled firmament, full of large, lustrous stars, circles, swift and noiseless, and everywhere is one unrelieved expanse of ice and snow. Sometimes the voyager meets a flock of floating mountains journeying southwards, huge masses of deathly whiteness, slow, silent, solemn as messengers from a dead world. At another time the Aurora Borealis suffuses the spectral world of ice; and fantastic villages, battlements, cloisters, pinnacles and spires, with unimaginable colors, make it look like a gorgeous collection of oriental cities. But always are found belonging there a remoteness, a strangeness, a terror, essentially solitary.