ness, toppling over and swallowed in the maw of the maelstrom its own plunging makes. There are several classes of persons who, as exiled from the open and genial fellowship of life, are alone, even when, from their egotistic absorption or their hardened indifference, they are not lonesome. The cynic, who admires and enjoys nothing, despises and censures everything, eager, morose, his milk of human kindness turned sour; the misanthrope, whose blood has been turned into gall by deception or disease, a malevolent villain, whose first impulse is to hate and avoid every one he meets, or to blast them with his scorn; the proud, haughtily holding their heads aloft, snuffing the incense of their own conceit, unable to stoop to the sweet offices of meek humanity, fancying the earth too base for their feet, and other men only good enough to be their servants; the mean, all whose experiences sneak in dark by-ways, too cowardly to face the sun and the loving eyes of men, unable to rise to the level of a generous sentiment, a noble enthusiasm, a momentary self-forgetfulness; such as these, destitute of the essential conditions of friendship, must be deprived of all the best fruitions of human society. The world and life must be to them comparatively what they were to the leper of the Middle Age. This abominated outcast, clad in a coarse gray gown reaching from head to foot, with the hood drawn over the face, went about carrying in his hand an enormous rattle, called Saint Lazarus's rattle, whose frightful sound warned every human being to keep at a distance; he was thus banished from his fellow men by a cordon of disease and horror drawn around him, which drove every one before it as he advanced. - The tiger, in his awful strength and voracity, when he forays in the trembling haunt of antelopes, is not more alone than the tyrant, wrapped in the pomps of power as in robes of ice, shaking a nation with his murderous nod, having a taster for every dish lest it be poisoned, wearing a secret shirt of mail lest some assassin reach him. The abandoned devotee of debauchery, giving full swing to depraved propensities, now rioting in excommunicate gratifications with sickening gusto, now shuddering with nameless horrors and anguish, lurking in hidden retreats, like Tiberius at Capri, exists in a hideous solitude. The criminal is drearily alone; temptation, struggle, guilt, remorse, despair, are the loneliest of experiences. Evil seduces and assails, is embraced or vanquished, singly and in private. Secretly and alone are we all led up into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. No one can be so unspeakably alone as the possessor of a foul and dreadful secret which turns nature into a listening confessional, and the disclosure of which he feels would instantly discharge the thunderbolts of doom. The prisoner of a guilty past, aching for communication, yet shrinking from it with terror, dying for sympathy, yet not daring to seek it, dwells in the most terrible of all solitudes. The memory of his crime, charged with dire bodements, fastened inextricably to his soul,- he feels as a victim bound to the stake, a distant girdle of faggots burning towards him. Though agonizing for deliverance, he fears to accept it: for, appalling as his loneliness is, how can he bear society, when he knows that, at any instant, the fatal secret sunk in the depths of his consciousness may slip the shot from its shroud and bolt on his horrified gaze! There are things, as we thus see, too mean and bad to be voluntarily disclosed, too wicked and terrible for a trustful communion; the fears they engender, the shocks they would impart, and the dangers they threaten, keep their subjects apart and taciturn in the suspicious and sinister seclusion of an inner secrecy. The wickedest man in the world is the most completely alone, in the etymological sense of the word, that is, all one, - sundered from these virtuous and blessed junctions with others which properly make each man a part of the whole of humanity. The Solitude of Genius. THE extreme of experience just described is the loneliness of the leprous. On the other hand there are souls occupied with matters so exaltedly noble and sensitive as to be generally incommunicable. This extreme is the loneliness of the laurelled. This class of men are lonely not because they do not dare, or cannot bear, or do not wish, the most intimate companionship. They are lonely because their states of consciousness are so swift and fine, their height of soul and range of life so vast and arduous, that their associates are unable to appreciate them. This brings us to the saddest and sublimest part of our theme, the solitude of genius. The lark rises against the rosy ceiling of day, far beyond the emulation of ground-birds; and genius soars into heaven in its worshipping joyousness until no earth-bound spirit can follow. The scale of its experience, in both directions equally, joy and sorrow, surpasses that of common persons. Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure All men of unusual mass and height of character wear a sombre hue of purpose which repels familiarity. "The love of retirement," Johnson impressively remarks, "has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge or elevated by wisdom. They have found themselves unable to pursue the race of life without frequent respirations of intermediate solitude. There is scarcely any man, eminent for extent of capacity or greatness of exploits, that has not left behind him some memorials of lonely wisdom and silent dignity." Every one conspicuous above his fellows in endowments is made solitary in that degree, unless his gifts, by ministering to their gratification, bring him into social relations with them and win him their applause. Even then the solace he finds is usually obtained by turning E the ordinary side of his nature into view and action, veil ing or suspending the peculiar endowment in which he so far surpasses others as to be an insulated unique. Mediocrity need not search for sympathizers; they swarm. Originality may seek widely and long, but in vain, for the equal love it desires. Originality is understood slowly and with difficulty, easily gains notice, less easily commands disciples, but most easily provokes dislike and creates foes, then itself revolts into disguise and seclusion, and only with the utmost labor and infrequency succeeds in discovering or making an adequate friendship. Extraordinary minds are painfully alone in the world because their actions cannot elicit harmonized reactions from the ordinary minds by which they are surrounded. And the latter are trained into satisfying conformity with the former only in such rare instances and with such pains, because that educational process requires a tenacity, a patient affectionateness, which the ordinary mind is not supplied with. The soul touched by God is separate. Prophets are lonely; Elijah, fed by ravens beside his secret cave and stream, -fed with meat in whose strength he travelled forty days unto Mount Horeb, we cannot think of as a social man. Paul, after his miraculous conversion and commission, says, "I conferred not with flesh and blood"; he withdrew into Arabia for a long season of meditation and spiritual training. It is reported of Jesus himself, that he oft "withdrew into the wilderness and prayed." What a lonely and strengthening time of it Luther had in Wartburg castle on the edge of the dark Thuringian forest; and Loyola in the sepulchral cavern of Manresa, on the banks of the limpid Cardinero! Great teachers too, as well as prophets, are lonely; there are so few prepared to understand them and give them welcoming response. "The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” Genius is alone both as to the world it constitutes and as to the world in which it moves. Souls of coarse fibre and mean store cannot responsively reproduce the delicacy and wealth of its inner experiences; neither can they see the supernatural glory of its outer visions. For genius beholds without, the wonders it first feels within. To its perception, in imaginative grief, the ocean is a universe of tears murmuring human woes. In its moods of abounding love and serenity every material object is an emblematic voice, a window of spirit, a divinized hieroglyph. When the two friends, Beaumont and De Tocqueville, were floating together at evening in a boat on one of the great lakes of the western continent, the latter says the moon stood in the edge of the sky "like a transparent door opening into another world." Such an expression would be unmeaning or distressing to a mere proser. Soft, rich, capacious genius, looking with eyes of inquiring tenderness into every soul it meets, and seeing nothing there correspondent with what is deepest and dearest in itself, is repelled into solitude. Then in pathetic disappointment, with rebounding and ebullient faith, it laves the void with the copious overflow of its emotions, until that void, filled with immortal spirits, with heaven and God, reflects upon the yearning giver and recipient wonderful answers of beauty and love. And so a divine peace is won, and solitude becomes more sufficing than society. When the young Michael Angelo went to Rome and began to study and labor there, he wrote home, — "I have no friends; I need none." The huge "confusion of the life of the metropolis only penetrated like a distant murmur" the solitude in which he dwelt and toiled, with little sympathy from other men, though with much admiration. His chief happiness was in absorbing work, and in the visions of that ideal realm where he walked as king. The famous platonizing English divine, Henry More, was lonely among the earthlings and partisans of his time. His ideality, learning, and earnest love removed him in spirit to a planetary distance from his worldlyminded neighbors, whom he characterized as "parrotlike prattlers boasting their wonderfull insight to holy truth, when as they have indeed scarce licked the outside of the glasse wherein it lies." He was wont to think "the angels looked on this troubled stream of the perish |