At the top of his mind the devout scholar has a holy of holies, a little pantheon set around with altars and the images of the greatest men. Every day, putting on a priestly robe, he retires into this temple and passes before its shrines and shapes. Here, he feels a thrill of awe; there, he lays a burning aspiration; further on, he swings a censer of reverence. To one, he lifts a look of love; at the feet of another, he drops a grateful tear; and before another still, a flush of pride and joy suffuses him. They smile on him: sometimes they speak and wave their solemn hands. Always they look up to the Highest. Purified and hallowed, he gathers his soul together, and comes away from the worshipful intercourse, serious, serene, glad, and strong.

Conclusion.

SINCE, in the particular tendencies of the present time, our weakness lies in the direction of a gregarious miscellany and loquacity of life, instead of an undue seclusion, it behooves us to court, rather than to repulse, solitude. Innocence is better than eloquence, self-sufficingness a costlier prize than social conquest, self-denial and oblivion an aim of diviner sweetness and height than self-assertion and display. A holy man may well rejoice to be delivered by obscurity from the blame and praise of the world, gliding unnoticed to his end like a still rivulet under the grass in some sequestered vale. But few in our days sincerely wish this. And yet it were wisdom and religion to covet it, and slay our deadly foes, lust and vanity, with the bright weapons of the saint, renunciation and faith.

Opinion is the rate of things,

By which our peace doth flow;
We have a better fate than kings,
If we but think it so.

Make we then frequent withdrawals into meditative loneliness and silence. And with reference to this let us remember what Marcus Antoninus so well says: "Nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does

a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity. Constantly then, give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest."

There is, therefore, for the tonic discipline or the repose of solitude, no need of going to any remote hermitage. The game of solitaire may be played as effectually in the drawing-room or on the sidewalk as in cell or desert.

There needs no guards in front and rear to keep the crowd away; Superior height of life and soul will hold them all at bay.

One thought, one recollection, one emotion, one sigh, and you may be as far from the comrades who are talking and laughing around you, as though mountain-ranges intervened or oceans rolled between. In any company let me but think, Now, soft and faint, the starlight is falling along the shattered colonnades of Karnac, - and I am alone. Let me glance upward where the ghostly moon is swimming through the noontide air, and I am alone. Let fancy go forth to the snow-laden flanks of the Alps, where the sombre pine-ranks are waving like hearseplumes over the corse of nature, - and I am alone. Let a dream of heaven rise in imagination, a glimpse of the faces of the unforgotten dead pass before the mental eye, a sense of the presence of God rise into consciousness, and, it matters not where the place is or how many noisy claimants press around, I am instantly and unutterably alone.

Even if we wish it not we must sometimes be alone. It is our duty to see to it that we are prepared to be alone profitably and cheerfully, without weariness and without fear. The difference in human solitudes is immense. The solitude was pleasing which Archimedes knew, so absorbingly occupied with his mathematical problems as to be unconscious of the capture of his Syra

cuse, and to be slain by the Roman soldiers sooner than forsake his fascinating work. But how painful, to a man of his sensitive warmth, was the solitude of the brave and generous Canning in his premiership at the close of his career, too proudly refined for democratic intimacies, cast off by his Tory associates on account of his liberal statesmanship, idolized by thousands who could not personally approach him, pitilessly persecuted by his surrounding enemies, stung at every pore, at once slowly bleeding and freezing to death on the height of his power. The loneliness felt by the subject of morbid superstition and terror resembles the landscape in the gloomy gorges of the Grand Chartreuse; while the loneliness felt by the subject of healthy faith and awe before the unknown realities of being, resembles the scene on the white roof of the Milan Cathedral, when some visitor, climbing thither by moonlight and gazing on the forest of statues, feels as though a flight of angels had alighted there and been struck to marble. We cannot always live in public. There are secrets and moments we can never share. We should be familiar with the necessity, and make it grateful. We should cultivate in thought its serene, contentful aspects, and guard against its oppressive, fearful aspects. The gifted man, isolated in proportion to his superiority, if needing sympathy, feels, Schopenhauer strikingly says, as though men had forsaken him; if self-sufficing, as though he had succeeded in running away from them. What a contrast of misery and blessedness in the states of these two! Who is it that sits on the world as lightly as a gull on the ocean, except he who has learned by solitary thought to detach his affections from the prides and vanities of society, and often to lose himself in the fruition of a transcendent faith? To be separated by ascetic superstition is to know the loneliness of Arsenius, who, after being tutor to the Emperor Arcadius, went into the desert, and for fifty years made his life one long solitary prayer. To be separated by the remorseful memory of crime, is to know the loneliness of Milo, when caught by the fingers in the rebounding oak he would split, and left as a prey to the

wild beasts. To be separated by absorption in some sweet care, is to know the loneliness of Izaak Walton trouting in a secluded glen. To the guilty and debased soul there may come a loneliness like the solitude of a volcanic peak, full of boiling lava and smoke. To the virtuous and trustful soul there may come a loneliness like the solitude of a spring in the desert, where, all night long, the wild children of nature successively slake their thirst; the fawn and the panther, the lion and the elephant, and the moon comes there, sees her fair face, and departs smiling.

Die away, then, vain murmur of tongues! Retreat, hollow hum of toils and cares! Fade out, cold procession of alien faces! Begone, fair seductions, that excite, then deceive and desert your victim! Cease to vex any more this poor brain and heart, ye restless solicitations to things that can never suffice, and that perish so soon! Disappear all, and leave me awhile alone, with my soul and nature, my destiny and my God!