r him that spake it to have put more truth and
untruth together in few words than in that speech: "Whosoever is
delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." For it is most
true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in
any man hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue that it
should have any character at all of the divine nature except it proceed,
not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to
sequester a man's self for a higher conversation, such as is found to
have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimenides
the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of
Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and Holy
Fathers of the Church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and
how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a
gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no
love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: _Magna civitas magna
solitudo_ ("A great town is a great solitude"), because in a great town
friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the
most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and
affirm most truly that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true
friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and, even in this
sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast and not
from humanity.

2. Society in Solitude[96]

What period do you think, sir, I recall most frequently and most
willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of my youth: they were too
rare, too much mingled with bitterness, and are now too distant. I
recall the period of my seclusion, of my solitary walks, of the fleeting
but delicious days that I have passed entirely by myself, with my good
and simple housekeeper, with my beloved dog, my old cat, with the birds
of the field, the hinds of the forest, with all nature, and her
inconceivable Author.

But what, then, did I enjoy when I was alone? Myself; the entire
universe; all that is; all that can be; all that is beautiful in the
world of sense; all that is imaginable in the world of intellect. I
gathered around me all that could delight my heart; my desires were the
limit of my pleasures. No, never have the voluptuous known such
enjoyments; and I have derived a hundred times mor