use in summer so many of
the hours of sleep are also hours of light. He carries the mood of man's
night out into the sunshine--Corot did so--and lives the life of night,
in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun. In the only time when
the heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmic
power of night at its dark noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring of
the actual sun.

He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To that
life belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds of
beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extreme
perception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the explanation of
all the memories of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done in
earlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of all
the world. Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets
with one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not of
welcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by the
spirit of the hours of sleep.

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization
has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has
given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its
shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right
foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the
case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the
nearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged together
into some blind by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are
ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own
for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed
corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,
landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,
and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by
miles; they are to be numbered by days. They are fr