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--- CONCERNING SOLITUDE ---

"With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either drift wood in the stream or Indra in the sky looking down at it. I only know myself as a scene of thoughts and affections, and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another; I am conscious of the presence of a part of me which is but spectator - no more I than it is you.

"I find it wholesome to be alone. I have never found the companion so companionable as solitude. We are more lonely when we go abroad than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or marking is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of the old musty cheese that we are ... We live thick and are in each other's way, and thus lose some respect for one another ... The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

"I have a great deal of company in my house, especially in the morning when nobody calls. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond, or the pond itself, which has not the blue devils but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone, but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company, he is legion. I am no more lonely than the horsefly or bumblebee - or the weathercock or the north star, on the January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

"The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, - such health, such cheer they afford forever ... Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? Where is the pill that will keep us well, serene, contented. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, let me have a draft of undiluted morning air. If men will not drink of this at the fountain head of the day, why, then, we must bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world ... I am worshipper of Hebe, daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, who restored Gods and men to the vigor of youth. Where ever she came, it was spring!