SOLITUDE. 
147 
may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes 
his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagi¬ 
nation only, so far as he was concerned. This double¬ 
ness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends 
sometimes. 
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of 
the time. To be in company, even with the best, is 
soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I 
never found the companion that was so companionable 
as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely 
when we go abroad among men than when we stay in 
our chambers. A man thinking or working is always 
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not meas¬ 
ured by the miles of space that intervene between a 
man and his fellows. The really diligent student in 
one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as 
solitary as a dervis in the desert. The farmer can 
work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or 
chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is em¬ 
ployed ; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit 
down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, 
but must be where he can “ see the folks,” and recreate, 
and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day’s soli¬ 
tude ; and hence he wonders how the student can sit 
alone in the house all night and most of the day with¬ 
out ennui and “ the blues; ” but he does not realize that 
the student, though in the house, is still at work in his 
field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, 
and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that 
the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form 
of it. 
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very 
short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new 
