PHYSICAL SOLITUDE AND SPIRITUAL LONELINESS. 33

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,

Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;

Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;

This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold

Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,

To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,

And roam along, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless,
Minions of splendor shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all that flattered, followed, sought and sued:
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude.

Epictetus, in his fine and brave little essay on Solitude, gives this as his definition of it. "To be friendless is Solitude." The more sharply we meditate on it, the more thoroughly we test it, the more deeply to the root of the matter we shall find this word of the cheerful Phrygian Stoic to go. Zimmermann says, "Solitude is that state in which the soul freely resigns itself to its own reflections." This is really no definition, it is a partial and superficial description, of solitude. More strictly it is a statement of one of the effects of being unoccupied from without. Obviously solitude is the deprivation of companionship; but our own reflections are often the bestowers of a vivid companionship. The true definition is this. Solitude is the reaction of the soul without an object and without a product. If our activity has objects, those objects serve as comrades: if it is creative, the results serve as comrades. But if our activity is the overflow of unemployed powers with no object to meet and return it, with no product to embody and reflect it, we are conscious of an unrelieved loneliness. Solitude, therefore, is the reaction of the soul without an object and without a product.

The Solitude of Individuality.

THE first specification to be made of the loneliness of human life is that which results from the fatal separateness and hiddenness of each individuality. The innermost secret of the self-hood of any being can never be communicated, can never be shown, to another. Only little superficial fragments of our life are revealed, in comparison with the portion which moves on in unguessed concealment. That marvellous something which makes us ourselves, constitutes in us an impenetrable adytum where only the Power that created us can be or look.

Vainly strives the soul to mingle

With a being of our kind:

Since the deepest still is single,

Vainly hearts with hearts are twined.

It is a well-known fact in physics that no two particles of matter ever truly touch; their contact is but virtual. An ultimate sphere of force surrounds each atom with a repulsion absolutely invincible. Were the total universe made a press and brought to converge on two atoms, that dynamic investiture could not be broken through and an actual meeting effected. So with souls. Alas, how widely yawns the moat that girds a human soul! Each one knows its own bitterness, its own joy, its own terrors and hopes; and no foreigner can ever really touch, but only more or less nearly approach, and exchange signals, like distant ships in a storm.

O the bitter thought, to scan
All the loneliness of man!
Nature by magnetic laws
Circle unto circle draws :
But they only touch when met,
Never mingle, — strangers yet.

Will it evermore be thus
Spirits still impervious?
Shall we never fairly stand
Soul to soul as hand to hand?
Are the bounds eternal set
To retain us, strangers yet?

Every man wrestles with his fate not in the public amphitheatre, but in the profoundest secrecy. The world sees him only as he comes forth from the concealed conflict, a blooming victor or a haggard victim. We hate or pity, we strive or sleep, we laugh or bleed, we sigh and yearn; but still in impassable separation, like unvisiting isles here and there dotting the sea of life, with sounding straits between us. It is a solemn truth that, in spite of his manifold intercourses, and after all his gossip is done, every man, in what is most himself, and in what is deepest in his spiritual relationships, lives alone. So thoroughly immersed is the veritable heart behind the triple thickness of individual destiny, insulating unlikeness and suspicion, that only the fewest genuine communications pass and repass; rarely in unreserved confidence is the drawbridge lowered, and the portcullis raised. Frequently the most intimate comrades of a life, when the whole tale of days is told, know little or nothing of each other; so successfully are our disguises worn, so closely are these impervious masks of sense and time and fortune fitted to the being we are. Occasionally, urged by overstress of curiosity and tenderness, taking the dearest ones we know by the hand, we gaze beseechingly into their eyes, sounding those limpid depths, if haply, reading the inmost soul, we may discern there a mysterious thought and fondness, answering to those so unspeakably felt in our own. again and again we turn away, at last, with a long-drawn breath, sighing, alas, alas! No solicitation can woo, no power can force, admission to that final inviolate sanctuary of being where the personality dwells in irreparable solitude.

But

Were this all, however, only the fewest persons would be troubled by their isolation. There is another experience, more open to view, and more oppressive to bear, that in its sharpness aches for companionship. What is it?

And what are its conditions? The solitude necessarily belonging to the inmost essence, structure, and contents of every personality we accept as a law of our being and circumstances. But to have a peculiar personality is to know a special loneliness which is a trial.

Peculiarities, in the degree in which they mark a soul, make that soul unintelligible to others. And the more unlike a soul is to the souls around it, as a general thing the greater desire it feels to see itself reflected in them, understood by them, sympathized with and cherished by them. Chamisso's unique tale of Peter Schlemihl or the Man without a Shadow, powerfully illustrates this. Wherever poor Peter goes, his lack of a shadow insulates him in wretched singularity. Every Jew,. curmudgeon, hunchback, roguish school-boy, spies out his fatal defect; and the mob pelt him with mud. He wears away days and nights in his chamber in solitary sorrow. He wanders on the heath alone with his misery, and at last betakes himself to a cave in the Thebais.

It is not simply for one to be by himself that makes him feel lonely. In the quaint phrasing of Sir Thomas Browne, we must confess that "they whose thoughts are in a fair and hurry within, are sometimes fain to retire into company to be out of the crowd of themselves." When our noisy task is done, and fellow-laborers retire, and outer tools and cares are dropped, and leisure ushers an inner world of congenial pursuits, we may truly say we are never more completely occupied than when idle. So a man, as Scipio said of himself, is really never less solitary than when physically alone, if his solitude be filled with spiritual presences that give employment to his mind, keep the currents of consciousness flowing.

:

Who contemplates, aspires, or dreams, is not
Alone he peoples with rich thoughts the spot.
The only loneliness - how dark and blind!
Is that where fancy cannot dupe the mind;
Where the heart, sick, despondent, tired with all,
Looks joyless round, and sees the dungeon wall.

So long as the fluent and refluent tides of thought and feeling freely rise and fall, we need not companions to make us happy when that condition fails, no society can prevent the painful longings of our lonesomeness. The fruition of a blessed communion is, in essence, simply a harmonized action and reaction of the soul and what surrounds it. Be this realized, and there is fellowship everywhere;

silence is melodious, and desertion itself social. Then out of the tender exuberance of his heart one may exclaim,

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar :
I love not man the less but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

True desertedness and its pangs are experienced when we want the appropriate nutriment and stimulus for our faculties and affections, fit dischargers and outlets for their fulness. It is to miss loved objects, the wonted excitants and channels of our souls, and to have no sufficing new ones in their stead, and to feel that none of the people around understand us and feel with us. The exiled Switzer pines in a foreign clime for his native mountains, the sublime prospect, the familiar legendary spots, the upland breeze, the stimulant variety, the boundless freedom and as he remembers, he weeps till his heart breaks. The soul, too, has its own deeper homesickness. An unappropriated enthusiasm ; a full heart aching for a vent and a return, and finding none; a spirit thwarted of its proper action and reaction :— this is the painful essence of solitude, the live vacuum of lonesomeness.

Not the mere presence of numbers can heal this spiritual pain. There is no solitude in the world so heavy as that of a great city to the sensitive stranger who stands in its streets, and sees the endless tides drift by, till he turns away, feeling, Of all these multitudes hurrying past, not one, not one, cares anything for me! Appropriate objects of thought and affection, if present in imagination, may furnish satisfying employment for the activities of the soul, however far they are removed in fact. The wild bird whose little heart throbs instinctively towards her nest and broodlets, is happy, as, all alone, she cuts the desert air towards home with a worm in her mouth. Galileo,