all created things are suffused. The deepest life is as silent as the soil out of which the glory of summer bursts; all noble activities issue from it, and no great work is ever done save by those who have lived in the repose which precedes creation.

CHAPTER XXIX.

"THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE."

WHEN I looked out of the study window this morning, and saw the wide stretch of country to the distant hills covered with drifting snow, which a fierce and wilful wind carried hither and thither in whirling clouds like vagrant wraiths, I knew what Emerson meant when he wrote that fine line about the tumultuous privacy of storm." Wind and snow bar all the gates to-day with invisible bolts; the village is as remote and detached as if it were on another continent. Across all the avenues of communication is written "no thoroughfare"; the road through the woods will remain for hours without a disturbing wheel, and with no traveler save the shy wild dwellers of the place, glad of this sudden barricade against human intrusion. On the hearth, as if answering the shouts of the riotous wind down the chimney, the fire burns with unwonted cheeriness.

On such a morning, when nature takes matters in her own hands and locks the doors of ingress and egress without so much as saying "by your leave,' one settles down to a day of meditation and reading

with peculiar and unqualified satisfaction. No hand will let the knocker fall, with resounding clangor, at the very moment when you have completely lost yourself in some beautiful country of the soul— some distant island where Prospero still holds his unburied rod and reads in his unsunken books; some valley of Avalon, where the apple blossoms still rain the sweetness of perennial summer on the mailed hand of chivalry. Best of all, no disquieting voice of duty will call persistently from some remote quarter; you have been bolted and barred against the intrusion even of your conscience. So lodged, one may give himself up to the solitude of the day without any other feeling than that of repose and delight. Happy is he whom life offers the gift of solitude; that gift which makes so many other gifts available! Happy is he to whom with books and the love of meditation there is also given the repose, the quiet, the isolation which are the very breath of the life of thought! We are swift to praise heroism and self-denial when these take on striking forms and appeal to the eye or the imagination; but how infrequent is our recognition of that noble resignation which takes the form of quiet acceptance of limitations which separate one from the work of his heart and divide him from the joy of his life!

Happy are they, however, to whom solitude brings its deep and satisfying joy-the joy of fellowship with great souls, of companionship with

nature in that sublime communion which Aubrey De Vere describes as "one long mystic colloquy between the twin-born powers, whispering together of immortality"; of quiet brooding over one's thought; of the rapture of the imagination detaching itself from the world of habit and work, and breathing the ampler ether of the great Idealisms. Nothing redeems a life from the barrenness of continued activity so completely as a stream of deep, silent meditation running under all one's work, and rising into light when the day of solitude comes round. It has been said of Shakespeare that his face bears the marks of habitual meditation; there is visible in it the calmness and fullness of a mind forever brooding over the deep things of life; steadied by contemplation of the unfathomable gulfs beneath, uplifted by vision of the shining heights above, calmed and held in poise by familiarity with the unmeasured forces which play about us.

There is no shirking of common duties, no selfindulgence, in this separation from our fellows. The Irishman who defined solitude as "being alone with one's sweetheart" was not so far out of the way as he seems at the first blush. For the solitude that is a necessity to thoughtful natures is not isolation; it is separation from the stress and turmoil of the world. Wordsworth's life at Grasmere was a life of solitude, but not a solitary life; on the contrary, it was enriched and ministered to by the most intimate and devoted companionship. That

companionship did not introduce new and contradictory influences in the poet's life; it brought no pressure of other and diverse aims and ideals to bear on his work. It confirmed and inspired him by constant and pervading sympathy. His days. were spent in solitude, without solitariness or isolation; the atmosphere of his fireside was not different from that which reigned among the hills in those long hours when the poet paced to and fro along his garden paths, chanting his own lines in low mono

tone.

There is nothing more delightful about the study fire than the sense of congenial solitude which it conveys the solitude of quiet, reposeful hours, "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." The world must be with us, but not too much with us, if we would gain that calm, complete mastery of ourselves which marks full intellectual stature. No large-minded man reviles the world; he knows its uses and value too well for that; it is the cramped, narrow, or morbid natures who seek complete isolation, and in the little circle of their own individualism find that satisfaction which comes to men of larger mold only from free and inspiring contact with the whole order of things of which they are part. It is not rejection of society, but wise and right use of it, which characterizes the man who lives most richly in the things of the mind. One finds. in solitude only that which he takes into it; it gives nothing save the conditions most favorable to growth.