ance." Wordsworth and Turner, if less systematic in
their isolation, were still solitary workers, and much of the peculiar
force and originality of their performance is due to their independence
of the people about them. Painters are especial sufferers from the
visits of talkative people who know little or nothing of the art they
talk about, and yet who have quite influence enough to disturb the
painter's mind by proving to him that his noblest thoughts are surest to
be misunderstood. Men of science, too, find solitude favorable to their
peculiar work, because it permits the concentration of their powers
during long periods of time. Newton had a great repugnance to society,
and even to notoriety--a feeling which is different, and in men of
genius more rare. No one can doubt, however, that Newton's great
intellectual achievements were due in some measure to this peculiarity
of his temper, which permitted him to ripen them in the sustained
tranquillity necessary to difficult investigations. Auguste Comte
isolated himself not only from preference but on system, and whatever
may have been the defects of his remarkable mind, and the weakness of
its ultimate decay, it is certain that his amazing command over vast
masses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any
participation in the passing interests of the world. Nothing in
intellectual history has ever exceeded the unshakable firmness of
purpose with which he dedicated his whole being to the elaboration of
the Positive philosophy. He sacrificed everything to it--position, time,
health, and all the amusements and opportunities of society. He found
that commonplace acquaintances disturbed his work and interfered with
his mastery of it, so he resolutely renounced them. Others have done
great things in isolation that was not of their own choosing, yet none
the less fruitful for them and for mankind. It was not when Milton saw
most of the world, but in the forced retirement of a man who had lost
health and eyesight, and whose party was hopelessly defeated, that he
composed the "Paradise Lost." It was during tedious years of
imprisonment that Bunyan wrote his immortal allegory. Many a genius has
owed his best opportunities to poverty, because poverty had happily
excluded him from society, and so preserved him from time-devouring
exigencies and frivolities.

The solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are
capable of understanding us. P