THE TWO SOLITUDES.

IN one of the articles paradoxically headed " The Wares of Autolycus " which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette last week,—the number for April /5th,—there was an in- teresting discussion on Solitude,—which is certainly not one of the wares of Antolyous, for no pedlar ever sold that. The writer gave a very graphic description of the worst kind of solitude, the solitude that makes you feel lonely but prevents you from feeling alone. Oddly enough loneliness is a quality some- times quite inconsistent with true aloneness, though the two words are occasionally used in the same sense. Wordsworth, for instance, says, "I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills," when we know from his sister's journal that he was not lonely at all, that he was with her, and that he shared with her that exquisite sense of solitude, of aloneness, to which he gave so delightful an expression in the lines on the daffodils. For you can share the best kind of solitude ; while the deepest feeling of utter and unredeemed loneliness which you ever feel is caused by not being alone, but with people who, as the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette said, are familiar with you without being intimate, and who watch each other with "a cold curiosity," like members of the same boarding-house. Wordsworth could never have exulted in that kind of loneliness, or indeed dreamt of saying that he could have enjoyed it as he enjoyed that solitude shared with his sister, which be found repeating itself again and again with a sort of rapture, whenever that vision of the daffodils dancing beside the lake, which " outdid the sparkling waves in glee," flashed again upon that "inward eye," which he called, or rather, as he tells us himself, which his wife suggested that he should call, the very " bliss of solitude." Here, then, are the two most opposite states we can conceive ;—the solitude which is the deepest in the world, and yet can be shared, and which is all the deeper and more thrilling for being shared with one or two others,—and the solitude which is mere loneliness, and is all the lonelier because you are not alone, but are hemmed in and spied upon by cold, curious, familiar observers.

We suppose that the truth is that what we really mean by solitude in the highest sense of the word, is that deeper vision of our own hearts and minds which is impos. Bible under prying eyes, and not always possible even when we are truly alone, unless there be some influence that stimulates and exalts the life of the heart, but which may be at its very highest point with the one or two real intimates who, like Wordsworth's sister and his wife, add to the visionary power of our minds, and make them, like Homer's heavens themselves, "spring open to their highest." In true solitude a man cannot be lonely, for if he has no other companion with him, he has that " great companion" of whom even the late Professor Clifford, in the pathos of his first dreary sense of the shrinking of all religion out of his soul, spoke as " dead," a dictum on which we understand that an eloquent London preacher descanted powerfully only last Sunday. That sudden glimpse of the true self which sometimes comes to us all in moments of

exalted vision, whether the exaltation be helped or not by the best human companionship, is hardly possible without a consciousness of that still higher companionship of which Wordsworth was the greatest of all modern interpreters,

though more truly inspired writers had anticipated him. "If r ascend up into heaven thou art there. If I make my bed in hell behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me." " Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth whom I desire in comparison with thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion

for ever." Not so keen a vision as this, but one perhaps that is oftener shared by others, of the great companionship that

never vanishes away, is Wordsworth's declaration :—

" I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

That is the modern way of describing the sense of solitude which is incompatible with loneliness, whether it spring up in the absence of all human companionship, or by the help of that companionship stimulating instead of distracting the higher vision. That is the kind of solitude of which the Dominican solitary wrote Solitude, maxima beatitude. We

cannot see truly and happily into our own selves without the consciousness of a mighty atmosphere of mind in the presence of which we are braced and fortified, and so lifted out of our- selves that we can gaze back into ourselves.

It is singular and somewhat humiliating that the familiar gaze of indifferent, not to say, cold, curiosity should have so blighting and paralysing an effect on the vision of the soul.

We ought to have, probably some very few persons,—they are generally saints,—actually have, the power of presenting a perfectly imperturbable surface of resistance to this distracting power wielded by ordinary and frigid observers. But with most men a gaze which is at once familiar and shallow makes the object of it feel both common and superficiaL A man in a boarding-house shrinks to the boarding-house level. He is no longer himself. He is a creature who eats and drinks at given times, and goes out at given hours, and is subject to all sorts of external and mechanical influences, and who hardly

dares think of himself as anything beyond a bundle of regulation actions for which every one looks. It is not easy to know why one's access to that which one carries within oneself should be more or less barred by the constant ignoring of that kind of life by other people ; for the inner life could not be what it is, if it were either recognised or recognisable by all the world. But it is certainly true that the familiar glance of people who know nothing of one's inner thoughts and most ardent hopes, has a stupefying and almost petrifying influence upon one, and that Cowper's "Far from the world, Oh Lord, I flee," is the expression of the natural attitude of a spiritual mind. It is curious enough that we should never be in the highest degree lonely unless in the presence of those who prevent us from being alone. But so assuredly it is, just as there is no silence, in the literal sense, which produces so

great an effect of silence on the mind as sound which indicates the habitual absence of man, in scenes closely associated with man's former presence and achievements. As Hood says that-

" —In green ruins, in the desolate walls

Of antique palaces, where Man bath been, Though the dun fox or wild hyxna calls, And owls that flit continually between, Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan, There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone."

And the solitude which is mere solitariness is just as different from the solitude which refreshes and renovates the soul, as the silence which is mere soundlessness is from the silence which derives all its expressiveness from the substitution of the sounds of wild nature for the voices of civilisation. All solitude that is really renovating, all solitude that really rests the mind and heart, opens the man to himself and gives him a greater insight into his own nature and his own powers. On the other hand, the solitude which is mere lone- liness, whether it be the mere sense of desertion by the world, or, what is often much more trying to bear, the corn-

panionship of those who look on you with afrigid and all but indifferent curiosity, freezes the heart of man, and makes it apprehend its poverty, its weakness, its cowardice, in a very exaggerated form. The Provost of Oriel, when he passed John Henry Newman in his walk, once addressed him with the words, " Never less alone than when alone," and of Newman that was certainly true. And indeed it would have been equally true to have said to him in many companies, "Never more alone than when in society." There are plenty of men who are con- stricted in most societies and who "come to themselves" either in the companionship of select friends, or in that greater companionship which Professor Clifford, in the melancholy of his later creed, is said to have spoken of as passed out of the reach of our generation. Yet both these two kinds of solitude are produced by companionship, the one by companionship which is either uncongenial or posi. tively repellent, the other by the companionship which vivifies every power of the mind and every feeling of the heart by catching it up into a purer atmosphere, and stimulating it into a new and intenser glow.