ainters say that they cannot work
effectively for very long together when separated from the society of
artists, and that they must return to London, or Paris, or Rome, to
avoid an oppressive feeling of discouragement which paralyzes their
productive energy. Authors are more fortunate, because all cultivated
people are society for them; yet even authors lose strength and agility
of thought when too long deprived of a genial intellectual atmosphere.
In the country you meet with cultivated individuals; but we need more
than this, we need those general conversations in which every speaker is
worth listening to. The life most favorable to culture would have its
times of open and equal intercourse with the best minds, and also its
periods of retreat. My ideal would be a house in London, not far from
one or two houses that are so full of light and warmth that it is a
liberal education to have entered them, and a solitary tower on some
island of the Hebrides, with no companions but the sea-gulls and the
thundering surges of the Atlantic. One such island I know well, and it
is before my mind's eye, clear as a picture, whilst I am writing. It
stands in the very entrance of a fine salt-water loch, rising above two
hundred feet out of the water and setting its granite front steep
against the western ocean. When the evenings are clear you can see
Staffa and Iona like blue clouds between you and the sunset; and on your
left, close at hand, the granite hills of Mull, with Ulva to the right
across the narrow strait. It was the dream of my youth to build a tower
there, with three or four little rooms in it, and walls as strong as a
lighthouse. There have been more foolish dreams, and there have been
less competent teachers than the tempests that would have roused me and
the calms that would have brought me peace. If any serious thought, if
any noble inspiration might have been hoped for, surely it would have
been there, where only the clouds and waves were transient, but the
ocean before me, and the stars above, and the mountains on either hand,
were emblems and evidences of eternity.

NOTE.--There is a passage in Scott's novel, "The Pirate," which
illustrates what has been said in this letter about the necessity for
concealing superior culture in the presence of less intellectual
companions, and I quote it the more willingly that Scott was so
remarkably free from any morbid aversion to society, and so capable of
taking a s