from the presence of it. Few have felt this more sharply than Charlotte Brontè; and she has described it: "Sometimes when I wake in the morning, and know that Solitude, Remembrance, and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through, that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless, - that next morning I shall wake to them again, I have a heavy heart of it." Charles Lamb, the exquisite affectionateness of whose nature, with his poverty and many bitter trials, made him especially susceptible of such an experience, shows us a glimpse of his sufferings from it in the poem he addressed to his friend Lloyd, when the latter sought him out in London, "alone, obscure, without a friend, a cheerless, solitary thing." He says:

George MacDonald, referring to an English traveller among the Swiss mountains, who snobbishly regarded all but himself as intruders, well says: "Was there not plenty of room upon those wastes for him and them? Love will provide a solitude in the crowd; and dislike will fill the desert itself with unpleasant forms."

Jesus is the supreme example of that loneliness which is felt as a consequence of the greatness of the love within and the smallness of the love without. "The foxes," he sighed, "have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." And when the Pharisee, at whose table he dined,. complained of the toleration he showed for the sinful woman, what a world of lonely and sorrowing tenderness is unveiled in his reply, "Simon, thou gavest me no kiss; but this woman hath not ceased to kiss my feet. Wherefore I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven for she loved much."

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Vivid and profound love shrinks from communicating its confidences, lest injury be done them, lest their hallowedness be profaned. Their delicacy is too ethereal for a rough hand; their vestal bloom is too holy for unconsecrated spectators. Grief, in its soreness, allows only the tender themes that are wonted and soothing to touch its hurt fibres; love, in its scrupulous sacredness, permits only the trusted and adored object to come near and read its confessions. The priest alone can be admitted to the shrine. Numa felt not lonely in his cave, but when he returned among the citizens. Interviews with any sacred Egeria tend to unfit us for ordinary fellowships. The dedicated privacy of a pure and modest heart cannot expose its shaded secrets to vulgar lookers. The more pertinaciously they explore, the more bashfully it shrinks. and veils. It can calmly brook no eye save that of God and the elected one. Therefore, around this most choice and sensitive experience there ever spreads a kind of solitude. It is true that the experience resulting from an access of fervent affection often has another aspect. Its expansiveness makes it many times seem emphatically social. "The heart, enlarged by its new sympathy with one, grows bountiful to all." Nevertheless the phase of the experience here insisted on is true too. Love affects not the dusty highway, but the woodland path. It retires to brood over its thick-clustering and honeyed thoughts. The maiden, with the picture of her lover, runs not into the crowd to gaze on it, but wanders into some umbrageous nook, where imagination may feed on itself, nor fear rebuke from the ring-dove balancing on yonder bough, or betrayal from that brook, the babbling tongue of the glen.

Solitude is not only the sanctuary, it is also the nursery, of sentiment; where, brooding over itself in quiet, and sympathetically brooding over whatsoever is friendly to it, it grows deeper, and draws around itself an everenlarging mass of nutritious associations. Petrarch, the high Laureate of this feeling, sings:

From hill to hill I roam, from thought to thought,
With Love my guide; the beaten path I fly,

For there in vain the tranquil life is sought.
If 'mid the waste well forth a lonely rill,
Or deep embosomed a low valley lie,

In its calm shade my trembling heart is still;
And there, if Love so will,

I smile, or weep, or fondly hope, or fear.

That which is true of sentiment in general is true of a just and genuine piety in particular. It is the shallow that is garrulous, the deep is silent. The name of Christ, the idea of Deity, the sense of eternity, the anticipation of heaven, the mysteries of sin and regeneration, are things too solemn and sublime to be bandied from mouth to mouth in technical debates and conventional conferences. Cleaving to the marrow of life, to the dividing asunder of spirit and flesh, they fitly appropriate to themselves the most select and awful moments of meditation, the most secret and sanctified moods of affection, when not a taint of passion befouls the heart, and the fewest vestiges of earth linger on the mind. It is an impressive fact that the subject of a religious conversion, in the freshness of his experience, instinctively shrinks from the world, seeks seclusion on some pilgrimage, or in some convent. The ideas of God, purity, judgment, the feelings of remorse, sanctification, joy, which have come into his soul with such revolutionizing power, are too stupendous for gossip. They withdraw him. He knows by instinct that he can maintain himself at their height only in solitude. The Christian convert flies to the monastery, to feed and hedge his faith with a guardian ritual; the Buddhist devotee betakes him to a sanctuary of the contemplative Buddha, to muse and aspire; the Brahmanical ascetic journeys on, over hill and plain, his almsdish in one hand, his staff in the other, alone,` silent, buried in a thought. Who that has any appreciation of divine things, of what is becoming, can bear to drag these innermost sanctities into the light, where a thousand discordant scrutinizers are gazing and listening, eager to handle and to criticise? No soul, save a hard and narrow one, can be otherwise than full of lonely awe when confronting that thought of God before which the globe

is but a bubble, and the sky a shadow. Plotinus defined the fruition of piety as a flight of the alone to the Alone." We always think of the oracles of the gods as dropping in grove and grotto, not in street and stadium. Lenau wrote to his friend, Anastasius Grün, from the summit of the Alps, "Solitude is the mother of God in man.' When Jesus would pray he "went apart into a mountain." Even to his dearest disciples, and that at a time when the need of sympathy was sorest, he said, "Tarry ye here while I go and pray yonder."

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Few persons have genius and soul enough to experience the highest religious emotions at first hand. The most can but poorly simulate and echo them, or copy their forms and attitudes at a distance. Thus the gigantic personalities, in whose tremendous powers and passions the chief religious experiences and rites now current first originated, come to be reproduced in dwarfed proportions and faded hues, as though the motions of a figure whose colossal bulk filled the space between earth and heaven were seen reflected in diminishing mirrors as the posturings of a puppet. To mirror livingly and originally the transcendent realities and relations from whose correspondences in consciousness the primal religious emotions are born, requires a depth and translucency of sensibility not possessed by one man out of a million. The mighty objects and truths which create religion by surpassing and baffling our powers, which engender in our ignorance and weakness the dread sense of dependence, wonder, and aspiration, refuse to reflect themselves in the shallow and turbid pools which poorer souls furnish. Religion, therefore, is essentially lonely and not social. The common notion to the contrary is a vulgar fallacy; a fallacy, however, almost unavoidable from the intimate association of sociality with religious phenomena. The true and pure religious emotions are essentially solitary, and love only loneliness; but the awe, mystery, helplessness, connected with them terrify us and force us to seek fellowship in our experience of them, as a relief and reassurance. It will always be found that for the exercise of their ultimate religious feelings the

highest, greatest, deepest souls irresistibly seek solitude, unspeakably enjoy it, and shrink from society at such times with insuperable repugnance. But to the multitude the direct and solitary contemplation of their relations with the unknown and the infinite is too awful; it must be shared, diluted, relieved by organic fellowships and poetic associations.

There are topics appropriate for speech, which naturally find utterance in address or conversation; there are other topics meet but for private contemplation and ordering, which find fit expression only in soliloquy. This subject has been treated with admirable precision and grace in two discourses on "The Sphere of Silence," by an English divine. They are to be found in that series of wonderful discourses by James Martineau, entitled "Endeavours After the Christian Life."* The naked verities of religion dwell in the last penetralia of our being where no mortal communion can reach. The knowledge and love of them must ever be a recluse experience, because their grandeur is so great as to monopolize the attention it secures, and because their modesty is such that they die away at the first proposal of exhibition or flattery. They will bestow their fellowship and reveal their forms in the dark mirror of the mental holy of holies, only when every wind of the world is whist, and a silence as of the primordial solitude reigns throughout the spaces of the soul. For experiences celestially fine and sensitive as these, public comparison, giddy talk, any sort of notoriety, is desecration. To strew pearls before the unclean who will turn and rend you for it, is an outrage on all that is fit; those of swinish character, having no taste for adorning themselves, but only a greed for coarse food, must be expected to turn angrily on the inconsiderate man who disappoints with indigestible jewelry their appetite for corn. A drunkard disparaging or eulogizing temperance, a harlot descanting

* Each one of these most beautiful and most valuable discourses is a key to some important compartment of human experience. He who really masters them carries thenceforth a precious bunch of the keys of life.