CHAPTER III.
The disadvantages of solitude.
The retirement which is not the result of cool and deliberate reason, so far from improving the feelings of the heart, or strengthening the powers of the mind, generally renders men less able to discharge the duties and endure the burdens of life. The wisest and best formed system of retirement is, indeed, surrounded with a variety of dangers, which are not, without the greatest care and caution, easily avoided. But in every species of total solitude, the perils are not only innumerable, but almost irresistible. It would, however, be erroneous to impute all the defects which may characterize such a recluse merely to the loneliness of his situation. There are original defects implanted by the hand of nature in every constitution, which no species of retirement and discipline can totally eradicate: there are certain vices, the seeds of which are so inherent, that no care, however great, can totally destroy. The advantages or disadvantages arising from retirement, will always be proportionate to the degrees of virtue and vice which prevail in the character of the recluse. It is certain that an occasional retreat from the business of the world will greatly improve the virtues, and increase the happiness, of him on whom nature has bestowed a sound understanding and a sensible heart; but when the heart is corrupt, the understanding weak, the imagination flighty, and the disposition depraved, solitude only tends to increase the evil and to render the character more rank and vicious; for whatever be the culture, the produce will unavoidably partake of the quality of the seeds and the nature of the soil; and solitude, by allowing a weak and wicked mind leisure to brood over its own suggestions, recreates and rears the mischief it was intended to prevent.
“… Where solitude, sad nurse of care,
To sickly musing gives the pensive mind,
There madness enters: and the dim-eyed fiend,
Lorn melancholy, night and day provokes
Her own eternal wound. The sun grows pale;
A mournful visionary light o’erspreads