and never feeling themselves happy in it long with such a painful homesickness; that air which may be found everywhere, if we can find the sympathetic souls to breathe it with us, and which is to be met nowhere without them, the air of the land of our dreams, of the country of the ideal. The story of this bewitching residence is described by Madame Sand in "Lucrezia Floriani," with all the empassioned gorgeousness of her art: she herself is La Floriani; Chopin is Prince Karol, and Liszt is Count Albani.

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At length, after a fatal rupture of affection, an agony worse than death, by a lingering decline not fuller of pain and sadness than of beauty and majesty, the long tragedy of life drew to a close; the lacerating conflict of the outer and the inner life, so successfully shrouded under that demeanor of tranquil politeness, was to find relief. The noblest of his Polish countrymen, the loveliest of his countrywomen, idolatrous friends, were unremitting in their attentions. One evening near his end, at sunset, he saw the beautiful Countess Potocka, draped in white, weeping, at the foot of his bed. 'Sing," he murmured. Amidst the hushed group of friends, the rays of the setting sun streaming upon them, she sang with her own exquisite sweetness the famous canticle to the Virgin which once saved the life of Stradella. "How beautiful it is! My God, how beautiful!" sighed the dying artist. None of those who approached the dying Chopin "could tear themselves from the spectacle of this great and gifted soul in his hours of mortal anguish." Whispering "Who is near me," he was told, Gutman, - the favorite pupil who had watched by him with romantic devotion. He bent his head to kiss the faithful hand, and died in this act of love.

They buried the room in flowers. The serene loveliness of youth, so long dimmed by grief and pain, came back, and he lay there smiling, as if asleep in a garden of roses. At the farewell service in the Madeleine Church, his own Funeral March and the Requiem of Mozart were performed. Lablache, who had sung the supernatural Tuba Mirum of this Requiem at the burial of Beethoven, twenty

two years before, now sang it again. In the cemetery of Père la Chaise, under a chaste tomb surmounted by his own marble likeness, between the monuments of Bellini and Cherubini, where he had asked to be laid, sleeps the hapless musician, whose weird and solemn strains are worthy to carry his name into future ages as long as men shall continue to contemplate the mysterious changes of time and the mute entrance of eternity.

THOREAU.

His

If any American deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of recluseness, Thoreau is the man. fellow-feelings and alliances with men were few and feeble; his disgusts and aversions many, as well as strongly pronounced. All his life he was distinguished for his aloofness, austere self-communion, long and lonely walks. He was separated from ordinary persons in grain and habits, by the poetic sincerity of his passion for natural objects and phenomena. As a student and lover of the material world he is a genuine apostle of solitude, despite the taints of affectation, inconsistency, and morbidity which his writings betray At twenty-eight, on the shore of a lonely pond, he built a hut in which he lived entirely by himself for over two years. And, after he returned to his father's house in the village, he was for the chief part of the time nearly as much alone as he had been in his hermitage by Walden water. The closeness of his cleaving to the landscape cannot be questioned: "I dream of looking abroad, summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain side, nature looking into nature, with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky." When he describes natural scenes, his heart lends a sweet charm to the pages he pens: "Paddling up the river to Fair-Haven Pond, as the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under, in

the tide of its own events, till it was drowned; and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast, hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side; and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them."

In his little forest-house, Thoreau had three chairs, one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." My nearest neighbor is a mile distant. It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars; and a little world all to myself." "At night, there was never a traveller passed my door, more than if I were the first or last man." "We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, — behind the constellation of Cassiopea's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a with rawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe." I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." In this last sentence we catch a tone from the diseased or disproportioned side of the writer. He was unhealthy and unjust in all his thoughts on society; underrating the value, overrating the dangers, of intercourse with men. But his thoughts on retirement, the still study and love of nature, though frequently exaggerated, are uniformly sound. He has a most catholic toleration, a wholesome and triumphant enjoyment, of every natural object, from star to skunk-cabbage. He says, with tonic eloquence, "Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness: while I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me." But the moment he turns to contemplate his fellow-men, all his geniality leaves him, he grows bigoted, contemptuous, almost inhuman: "The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs. I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds." The cynicism and the sophistry are equal. His scorn constantly exhales : "The Irishman erects his sty, and gets drunk, and jabbers more and more under my eaves; and I am re

sponsible for all that filth and folly. I find it very unprofitable to have much to do with men. Emerson says

that his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of resources, and, among the rest, to men. I have seen more men than usual, lately; and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little business each day, to pay their board; then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and, when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." Once in a while he gives a saner voice out of a fonder mood: "It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar; and, when we soar, the company grows thinner and thinner, till there is none at all." But the conceited and misanthropic fit quickly comes back: "Would I not rather be a cedar post, which lasts twenty-five years, than the farmer that set it; or he that preaches to that farmer?" "The whole enterprise of this nation is totally devoid of interest to me. There is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves. What aims more lofty have they than the prairie-dogs?"

This poisonous sleet of scorn, blowing manward, is partly an exaggerated rhetoric; partly, the revenge he takes on men for not being what he wants them to be; partly, an expression of his unappreciated soul reacting in defensive contempt, to keep him from sinking below his own estimate of his deserts. It is curious to note the contradictions his inner uneasiness begets. Now he says, "In what concerns you much, do not think you have companions; know that you are alone in the world." Then he writes to one of his correspondents, "I wish I could have the benefit of your criticism; it would be a rare help to me." The following sentence has a cheerful surface, but a sad bottom: "I have lately got back to that glorious society, called solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled." At one moment, he says, "I have never felt

lonesome, or the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once; and then I was conscious of a slight insanity in my mood." At another moment he says, "Ah! what foreign countries there are, stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy! Their humanity affects one as simply monstrous. When I sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me -I was going to say- in contact, I feel a sort of awe, and am as forlorn as if I were cast away on a desolate shore. I think of Riley's narrative, and his sufferings." That his alienation from society was more bitter than sweet, less the result of constitutional superiority than of dissatisfied experience, is significantly indicated, when we find him saying, at twenty-five, “I seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation"; at thirty-five, "I thank you again and again for attending to me"; and at forty-five, “I was particularly gratified when one of my friends said, 'I wish you would write another book, write it for me.' He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself."

The truth is, his self-estimate and ambition were inordinate; his willingness to pay the price of their outward gratification, a negative quantity. Their exorbitant demands absorbed him; but he had not those powerful charms and signs which would draw from others a correspondent valuation of him and attention to him.] Accordingly, he shut his real self in a cell of secrecy, and retreated from men whose discordant returns repelled, to natural objects whose accordant repose seemed acceptingly to confirm and return, the required estimate imposed on them. The key of his life is the fact that it was devoted to the art of an interior aggrandizement of himself. The three chief tricks in this art are, first, a direct self-enhancement, by a boundless pampering of egotism; secondly, an indirect self-enhancement, by a scornful depreciation of others; thirdly, an imaginative magnifying of every trifle related to self, by associating with it a colossal idea of the self. It is difficult to open many pages in the written record of Thoreau without