Lamb said, "He who thought it not SOLITUDE. good for man to be alone preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself!" Byron said, "All the world are to be at Madame de Staël's to-night, and I am not sorry to escape any part of it. I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone." "In the world," said De Sénancour, "a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages." "Conversation," observes Gibbon, "enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius." "Solitude," as Lowell expresses it, "is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character." Wholesome "Solitude," says De Quincey, "though acter. silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone.

How much this fierce condition of

to the char

ry effect of

too much company.

eternal hurry upon an arena too exclusively human in its interests is likely to defeat the grandeur which is latent in all men, The ordina- may be seen in the ordinary effect from living too constantly in varied company. The word dissipation, in one of its uses, expresses that effect; the action of thought and feeling is too much dissipated and squandered. To reconcentrate them into meditative habits, a necessity is felt by all observing persons for sometimes retiring from crowds. No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude. How much How much solitude, so much power." Late much power. in life, Sydney Smith wrote: "Living a great deal alone (as I now do) will, I believe, correct me of my faults, for a man can do without his own approbation in much society; but he must make great exertions to gain it when he is alone; without it, I am convinced, solitude is not to be endured." Klopstock, in his Messiah, expresses it: "Solitude holds a cup sparkling with bliss in her right hand, a raging dagger in her left; to the blest she offers her goblet, but stretches towards the wretch the ruthless steel." Julian Hawthorne, writing of his father, says that not even

solitude, so

Letter.

the author's wife ever saw him in the act of writing. He had to be alone. Years after The Scarlet Letter was published, the The Scarlet author revisited the solitary upper room in which it was written, and entered in his note-book, "In this dismal chamber fame was won." Balzac, when he had thought out one of his philosophical romances, and amassed his materials, retired to his study, and from that time until his book was finished, society saw him no more. When he appeared again among his friends he looked like his own ghost. Lincoln, it is Lincoln. said, had a habit of occasionally spending a whole day by himself in the broad prairie under the blue expanse of heaven, which gave to his face, for a time afterwards, a certain expression of otherworldliness. The only pulpit orator who ever helped me to a conception of the patriarchs and prophets was a circuit-rider who read his Bible in the wilderness. Jesus went up into the mountain alone to pray. Moses Moses. was buried in a lost ravine: "angels were his pall-bearers, and God Almighty dug his grave." No man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day.

STYLE.

Read, says Southey, all the treatises upon composition that ever were composed, and you will find nothing which conveys so much useful instruction as the account given by John Wesley of his own way of writing. "I never think of my style," says he, "but just set down the words that come first. Only when I transcribe anything for the press, then I think it my duty to see that every phrase be clear, pure, and proper conciseness, which is now as it were natural to me, brings quantum sufficit of strength. If after all I observe any stiff expression, I throw it out, neck and. shoulders." "The ultimate rule is," said Carlyle: "learn so far as possible to be intelligible and transparent - no notice taken of your style, but solely of what you express by it.” "Remember," says CowPerspicuity per, "that, in writing, perspicuity is always half the bat- more than half the battle. The want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning, because nobody will take the pains to poke for it." "Clear writers, like clear fountains," wrote Landor, “do not seem so deep as they are: the turbid look the most profound." "In composing, as a

more than

tle.

general rule," advised Sydney Smith, "run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style." Bacon, it has been Bacon. well said, packs his meaning till the plain words take on an air of enigma from their very excess of significance; it is a condensed speech, - a dialect borrowed from the gods. "The best passages in our chief prose writers, no less than in our poets, are where the phraseology has become oracular; the verbiage grows wiser than the thoughts, more tender than the feelings; and the man who falls into this trance of language is himself the most amazed at the glory and the beauty of the utterance." "A style grows from within, and forms only round a nucleus of thought." "Language is part of a man's character." "A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes." "The sentences of Sen- The seneca are stimulating to the intellect; the Seneca, sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the and Marcus character; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul." Carlyle, in describing the style of Marquis Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), gives a pretty good description of his own: "Marquis Mirabeau had the indisputablest ideas;

tences of

Epictetus,

Aurelius.