happily, for long together, with people who feel themselves your
inferiors. The very utmost skill and caution will hardly avail to hide
all your modes of thought. Something of your higher philosophy will
escape in an unguarded moment, and give offence because it will seem
foolish or incomprehensible to your audience. There is no safety for you
but in a timely withdrawal, either to a society that is prepared to
understand you, or else to a solitude where your intellectual
superiorities will neither be a cause of irritation to others nor of
vexation to yourself.

Like all our instincts, the instinct of solitude has its especial
purpose, which appears to be the protection of rare and delicate natures
from the commonplace world around them. Though recluses are considered
by men of the world to be doomed to inevitable incompetence, the fact is
that many of them have reached the highest distinction in intellectual
pursuits. If Shelley had not disliked general society as he did, the
originality of his own living and thinking would have been less
complete; the influences of mediocre people, who, of course, are always
in the majority, would have silently but surely operated to the
destruction of that unequalled and personal delicacy of imagination to
which we owe what is inimitable in his poetry. In the last year of his
life, he said to Trelawny of Mary, his second wife, "She can't bear
solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead." Here is a
piteous prayer of his to be delivered from a party that he dreaded:
"Mary says she will have a party! There are English singers here, the
Sinclairs, and she will ask them, and every one she or you know. Oh the
horror! For pity go to Mary and intercede for me! I will submit to any
other species of torture than that of being bored to death by idle
ladies and gentlemen." Again, he writes to Mary: "My greatest delight
would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you
and our child to a solitary island in the sea; would build a boat, and
shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no
reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination it
would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions beside
yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen; where two
or three are gathered together, the devil is among them." At Marlow he
knew little of his neighbors. "I am not wretch enough," he said, "to
tolerate an acquaint