n
articulate in philosophic age.

To this beauty of plain life I cannot attain. But my own life is as far
removed as may be from brilliant or luxurious pleasures, and I divide my
time between the country and the town. This I do from obedience to
reason rather than fashion; for while the country has my love, the city
is more remedial to my peculiar pain. There the shy man may have what
Lamb called the perfect and sympathetic solitude, as opposed to the
"inhuman and cavern-haunting solitariness," to which his infirmity
inclines. There he and those who rub shoulders with him on the pavement
can "enjoy each other's want of conversation." No creature with a heart
can jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly
feeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their
own way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring
red buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway
of navigation. And in a city there are voices of cheerful exhortation
always echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, which
in the interludes of coarser sound, or by our removal into some quiet
court or garden, may be heard repeating their stirring watchwords of
endeavour. We are told that no word spoken ever dies, but goes
reverberating through space for ever. It is my fancy that only evil
words escape into the outer void, which eternally engulfs their
profitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are not thus
lightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still near
above us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears which
are strained towards them. The laden air of towns carries not the rumour
of the battle only, but by the presence of these fair echoes held within
it, gives back to the soul more health than ever it drew from the body.
With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom and
clamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else seem
abandoned in the outer desolation.

Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its
own wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a
tedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich
a field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I
often map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall
remind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts or