on the nature of virtue, or an epicure discussing the worth of denial and heroism, is an odious spectacle. The highest instincts of the soul demand moral congruity. Who could endure to pour the weird strains of Mendelssohn's Dream amidst the rattling of the square and the mart? Who would not rather hide the pictures of Perugino forever than display them on the walls of a slaughter-house? There are pure and holy women who never expose their charms or share their delights with the world, as there are lakes that, on the untrodden tops of mountains, like eyes of the earth, look only up to heaven. Every virgin solitude is perfumed with the Divine presence, and balsamic for mental bruises. Divinely drawn, the soul flees thither to be the guest of God, and Silence is the sentinel of their interview. A retired and self-guarded life of devotion to nature is like a priestly life of temple-worship; as a German woman of genius has said, "When the boy Ion steps before the portals, and signs to the flying storks not to defile the roof, when he sprinkles the threshold with sparkling water, and cleans and decorates the halls, I feel in this solitary occupation a lofty mission which I must reverence. Ah, I too would be a youth, to fetch water in the fresh morning, while all yet slumber, to polish the marble pillars and bathe the statues, to cleanse everything from dust until it glistens in the gloaming; and then, when the work is done, to rest my hot brow on the cool marble, rest the bosom that palpitates with emotion at the beauty which breaks into the temple with the dawn."

There is a suitableness of person, of scene and season, required for the unveiling of the secrets, and the contemplation of the treasures, of affection. Refined and thoughtful must be the person, not harsh and reckless; the scene and season, not obtrusive and noisy, but retired and still. Whatever reeks and roars with the rushing world, shocks and defiles. Pure and pensive solitude is the setting that woos the living pictures. Nor is there any one wholly destitute of this lonely companionship of love, this saddening wealth of joy. The veriest wretch in the world has some dear memory, some beautiful long

ing, some guarded ideal, so fondly prized that he loves to set apart secret moments for pilgrimages to its inner sanctuary, there to worship, perhaps to weep, where no eye can see and no ear can hear. So even the most superficial votary of fashion, the most inconsiderate retailer of petty scandals, has her times of uncompanionable reflection, unfathomable emotion and desire. Occasionally this is found to be true in cases where it would have been least suspected, so carefully had it been concealed. Reckless critics often make the cruelest misjudgments here. Not unfrequently those thirsting most for love shrink most from notice. Obscurity is their shield.

What can be so melancholy as to have sacred experiences, which ache for expression and sympathy, and not dare to expose them for fear of repulse or ridicule? It is more melancholy not to have them. The glorious, sad solitude of one devoted to the highest ends, who can find no comrades, who roams the streets at night, weeping, longing for some one to walk and talk with him, to aspire and work with him, — is more to be admired than to be pitied. The weeping is indeed a weakness, but it expresses a strength. To call such an one an egotist or a sentimental fool, to laugh or sneer at his pain, is a wicked heartlessness, however often it is done. The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty, by how little. God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others. In the former the divine charm is followed by immediate popular recognition: in the latter it is usually hidden for a long time from all except the deep-souled and deep-seeing few. It is not improbable that the truest saints have never been heard of :

Too divinely great

For Fame to sully them with state,

they have modestly offered themselves up to the UNIVERSAL in seclusion and silence.

There is an hour, the transition between day and night, celebrated by the poets, with Dante at their head, which fine souls in all ages have felt as the votive season of sentiment, pensive twilight, the dim-tinted habitation

of solitude and sacredness, hailed with mountain-horns and hymns, bells and prayers, while Nature herself, half steeped in roseate hues, half mantled in shadow, seems to be tenderly musing.

Soft hour which wakes the wish and melts the heart

Of those who sail the seas, on the first day

When they from their sweet friends are torn apart;
Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way,

As the far bell of vesper makes him start,
Seeming to weep the dying day's decay.

It is the favorite hour of all poetic lovers who have ever consecrated it to their beloved, love they what they may; when they retreat by themselves from "the thick solitudes called social," to indulge and nourish their master-sentiment; when sensitive genius keeps tryst with its idolized ideal, the betrothed keep tryst together, and saints keep tryst with the spirit of devotion and their God.

The Solitude of Occupation.

PURSUING our subject a step further, we come to a separated experience, resulting neither from the injured sensibility of grief, nor from the enshrined devotedness of love, but from lack of room for forms of extra fellowship. It is the solitude of an absorbing occupation. Whatever fills the capacity of the soul, of course, for the time, excludes everything else; and there thus results an apparent singleness and separation. Augustine, struggling in the crisis of his conversion, in the chamber of his friend

Alypius, says, "I was alone even in his presence." This principle is the key to one of the marked varieties of the isolation in human life. A man with a great mission, an intense passion for some definite object, is thereby set apart from the common crowd of associates whose free impulses are ready to respond to every random appeal. He has no loose energies to spare in reaction on stray chances or incoherent claims: his whole soul is given to the one aim and its accompaniments. Sometimes an illusion, fastening in the mind, appropriates the

thoughts and passions as its food, and makes the man its servant. Others laugh at his absurdity, or turn carelessly from him as an oddity. Elated with his error, fondling his idol, he heeds not their scorn or their neglect. Lost

in his idiosyncratic joy or anxiety, hugging his peculiar purpose to his breast, he drifts through the frigid wilderness of society, as essentially alone as a sailor lashed to a spar on the ocean.

Dante was made lean for many years by the exactions of his supreme poem. Devouring his time, thought, feeling, soul, in his wanderings and poverty, it made him passing solitary among men, and kept him stern, sad, and serene on a wondrous fund of tenderness and vehemence. Ceaselessly quarrying at the rock of eternal flame and fame, he conquered daily peace. If not thus absorbed how his mighty heart must have gnawed itself, and the insect swarm of care, hate, and sorrow have stung him mad!

Who could be more distinctively by himself than Columbus, made a lonely visionary by a sublime dream which he had determined to embody in a visible demonstration of fact before the world. Equally solitary in his soul and in his design, whether pacing the strand, buried in thought, or reasoning with the monks of Salamanca, his scheme absorbed him, his originality set him on a pedestal above the heads of living men, among the illustrious pioneers of history, of whom he claimed lineage, with whom he felt his place and sympathy to be.

Every first-rate mechanician or inventor who has created astonishing machines, has been remarkable for his absolute abstraction from outward things, and his intense interior absorption during the incubation of his projects. All discoverers or schemers of the highest order, all intense idealists and workers, are in this manner taken possession of by their destined vocation. And thenceforth they know nothing else. Conversing with their thoughts, toiling at their plans, devising methods, or imagining the results of success, they walk up and down, deaf to every foreign solicitation and to every impediment.

Come what will their task engrosses them, their

fate cries out, and all else must give way. Such men are essentially alone; though it is an unresting, contentful isolation, unlike the vacant, asking isolation of unabsorbed men. Its proper type is the loneliness of a waterfall in the bosom of unreclaimed nature; or the loneliness of a beehive in a hollow oak in the heart of the untrodden forest.

We must not overlook, however, the wide difference between a solitude felt as such in pain and pining, which implies unappropriated powers, and is a condition of misery, and the solitude which is unconscious, wherein the soul is self-sufficing, its occupation leaving nothing unsupplied for the time, no wish for external sympathy or help. The latter is one of the happiest forms of life, in spite of its somewhat withdrawn and melancholy aspect. Apart from social interchanges, it may appear dreary and monotonous; but it is not so. Mendelssohn was repeatedly known to wander through crowds, with abstracted face, soliloquizing strains of music to himself, lost, in this improvisation, to all about him. On writing the last sentence of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Gibbon looked up at Mont Blanc, and drew a deep sigh. "The sudden departure of his cherished and accustomed toil, left him, as the death of a dear friend would, sad and solitary."

In fact, for solid happiness and peace, there are none more favored than those blessed with a master-passion and a monopolizing work. In the congenial employment thus secured, the earnestness of their faculties is called out and dedicated. They thus find for themselves and in themselves an independent interest, dignity, and content, together with exemption from most of the vexatious temptations by which those are beset whose enjoyment rests on precarious contingencies beyond their own power. An enthusiastic ornithologist, like Audubon or Wilson, roaming through trackless forests and prairies. beyond the outermost haunts of civilization, busy now with rifle and knife, now with brush and palette, lover of nature, lover of beauty, lover of solitude, lover of his chosen pursuits, — what matchless health and cheer and