gazing at the constellations through the grating of his cell, and feeling the fellowship of the illustrious conquerors of science in all ages, was less alone than when he knelt amid the scowling throng of inquisitors to retract the truth. Not visible approximation, but conscious affinity, is the chief condition of inter-communication. What good is it that prison wards are in juxtaposition, and that the stars are thick? As well for each other not to exist, as to exist hopelessly sundered from knowledge and sympathy. The king and the footman may consort as the lion and the jackal: but bodily presence is not friendship; exchange of command and obsequiousness between superior and inferior is not the satisfaction of the natures of both in common communion. Unlike souls, though crowded together in ranks, may all the while be as lonely as the rows of funeral urns in a columbarium. John Foster writes in his journal, "Relapsed into the solitaire feeling of being a monad; a self-originating, sad and retiring sentiment which seems to say, 'No heart will receive me, no heart needs me.'” Again he writes, in the same journal, "Feel this insuperable individuality. Something seems to say, 'Come away; I am but a gloomy ghost among the living and the happy. There is no need of me; I shall never be loved as I wish to be loved, and as I could love.' I will converse with my friends in solitude; then they seem to be within my soul; when I am with them, they seem to be without it."

The grave-digger, wholly by himself, shovelling up the skull of poor Yorick, was in a jovial entertainment of merry thoughts. Hamlet, isolated by his sad endowments, shaking his disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul, moved about in the busy press of ladies and courtiers, appallingly alone. To a great nature, deeply in earnest, frivolous and shallow company makes desertion twice desolate, as certain sounds serve but to make stillness seem doubly still. The tenacious tenants of holy moods and mighty tasks have little in common with the fugitive hoverers who flutter in and out of every whim that rises. Any exceptional deprivation, gift or experience, either in kind or degree, in proportion

to its distinctive intensity, separates, — emphasizes its subject with solitariness. The loss of any sense by man, as that of hearing, lifts a sad, dark barrier between him and his fellows. The solitude of blindness is pre-eminently deep and oppressive. And it is pathetic to think how many great men have, like Homer and Milton, had the windows of their souls thus closed. Galileo, in his seventy-third year, wrote to one of his correspondents: "Alas! your dear friend has become irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times beyond the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space which I myself occupy. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore, please me also." Handel passed the last seven years of his life in total blindness, in the gloom of the porch of death. How he and the spectators must have felt when the great composer, in seventeen hundred and fifty-three, "stood, pale and tremulous, with his sightless eyeballs turned towards a tearful concourse of people, while his sad song from Samson, 'Total eclipse, no sun, no moon!' was delivered."

Nothing can be more lonely than the chief characters in literary fiction, with exceptional endowments, aims and achievements, such as Prometheus, Faust, St. Leon, Zanoni. Hawthorne has expressed a kindred thought, with his usual vigorous felicity. "The perception of an infinite shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that puts an individual ajar with the world." Hawthorne was himself a lonely man afflicted with a morbid shyness. He had a preternatural insight into the secrets, especially the pathological secrets, of human nature. That high idea of himself, intensely emotional, which with his genius he could not fail to have, was associated with a feeling of inability to impress it properly and see it reflected in others. In such an example, extreme shyness, with all its miserable torture, is no proof of pride or egotism in its subject. It

simply proves the sharp power with which a sub-conscious occupation with his reflection in others possesses him. It is that he has extraordinary sympathy, not extraordinary selfishness. But it is, unfortunately, a viscid and attached, not a sparkling and free, sympathy. And it is one of the most fatal barriers to surrender, fusion, and joy in company.

The Solitude of Grief.

THE most common and obvious of the secluding experiences of man is grief. Bereavement, in its essence, is always the loss of some object accustomed to draw forth the soothing or cheering reactions of the soul. The activity thus deprived of its wonted vent becomes a source of pain. Turned back upon itself, it aches with baffled yearning; or, forced upon objects unfitted to the fine habit of its affection, it feels desecrated and agonized. A necessary sense of loneliness is therefore associated with every deep form of grief. Amidst all its changing elements a feeling of desertion is the steady characteristic. Those who have stood by the death-bed of a beloved being whose departure from the earth seemed to leave the earth poor and cold, can never forget the desolating sense of solitude that came when the parting breath went. The soul of the dying seems borne away from us on the long-drawn sigh of his last fondly whispered farewell, as on a wave sweeping him far up the heavenly beach, but leaving us behind to struggle alone in the dark flood.

The removal of customary objects of love, hope, and care, - the blasting of a cherished enterprise, the decay of a once inspiring faith,— around which our thoughts danced in melodious measure and the currents of our emotions ran merrily, - causes a revulsion; leaves behind a wretched emptiness and a more wretched fulness, with no joining channel between, which compose the very substance and anguish of lonesome sorrow. Such an experience is a natural consequence of a great defeat, flinging the deep permanent shadow of disappointment athwart

the landscape of after-life. It is difficult to conceive of a denser internal solitude than that which might enwrap a defeated general, a captive king or queen, borne in triumph over the Appian Way, through a fluctuating ocean of Romans. Paulus Æmilius, five days before enjoying the most brilliant triumph Rome had ever seen, lost one of his two younger sons; and three days after the triumph he lost the other. He was borne like a god in his car, through miles of glittering and shouting humanity, amidst endless throngs of captives and chariots loaded with spoils, his heart breaking within him. Past glory and bliss set in an exile's memory against present shame and woe, personal loss and sorrow contrasted with public gain and exultation, is the very separation of separation. Such an image of loneliness, hard to surpass, is presented in Keats's picture of old Kronos, the father of the gods, dethroned and banished by the rebellious young Zeus ;

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Sate gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone.

What an eloquent image of grief, and what a tragic picture of loneliness, is the prophet Jeremiah, with white beard and broken harp, sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem, when the heathen had ravaged the city of his idolatry, and the darling hope of his life was blasted! When out of this bereft and forsaken lot a voice of lamentation is heard, whose articulations are sobs, no wonder they sound to the vulgar revellers of the world as the accents of a strange tongue which they cannot understand. No wonder, either, that the delicate and profound children of misfortune and sadness should shrink from exposing their afflictions to the superficial heirs of success and gayety, but should rather flee into retirement, there to ease their pangs with tears, and with exercises of trust and prayer charm their souls into the embrace of nature and God. Here we reach the loneliness of the closet, where no echo of the roistering crew or the toiling crowd penetrates; a retreat sacred to sad memory, healing thought, and pious rites. I have seen, in an Alpine pass, a slow

deep-tinted mist wind itself around the cruel crags, splintered peaks which stood like so many horrid tusks goring the sky, wind itself around them till they seemed couches soft enough for angels to furl their wings to repose on. So, in its patient religious loneliness, does the rich sensibility of genius gather beautiful associations around the lacerating points and passes of grief, robbing them of their harshness.

But besides the solitude shed around the afflicted by their inward grief, they seek seclusion on account of the exquisite state of their sensibilities, freshly torn and unable to encounter the miscellaneous exposures of society. The grieved heart, like the wounded deer, retreats into solitude to bleed. Sometimes it is cruel, ah! sometimes it is kind, to leave the unhappy alone with his unhappiness. The subject of a severe sorrow, the fibres of his spirit rent from their habituated clingings, shrinking in self-defence from every coarse contact, courts the secrecy of his chamber, of lonely walks, or wraps himself in the protection of an unnoticing absorption. The mind bruised by the blows of calamity, the tendrils of its affections hanging lacerated, is so susceptible in its soreness that it cannot bear, even in thought, the collisions of the careless. To its exacerbated tenderness every breath is a shock, every touch torture. Under these circumstances the instinctive safeguard is the shelter of silent loneliness. It has well been said, "Solitude is the country of the unhappy." On the death of his darling daughter Cicero fled from Rome to a still retreat whence he wrote to his friend Atticus: "Nothing can be more delightful than this solitude, nothing more charming than this country place, the neighboring shore, and the view of the sea. In the lonely island of Astura, on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea, no human being disturbs me; and when early in the morning I retire to the leafy recesses of some thick and wild wood, I do not leave it till the evening. Next to my Atticus nothing is so dear to me as solitude, in which I hold communion with philosophy, although often interrupted by my tears." That social usage which gives the afflicted an investiture em