The disadvantages, however, which studious characters have been described to experience from habits of solitary seclusion, and by neglecting the manners of society, must not be indiscriminately applied. It is the morose and surly pedant, who sits silently in his solitary study, and endeavors to enforce a character for genius in opposition to nature, who adopts the mean and unworthy arts of jealousy, suspicion, and dishonest praise. Far different the calm, happy, and honorable life of him who, devoted to the cultivation of a strong understanding, and the improvement of a feeling heart, is enabled, by his application and genius, to direct the taste of the age by his liberality of spirit, to look on his equals without jealousy, and his superiors with admiration; and, by his benevolence, to feel for the multitude he instructs, indulgence and affection; who, relying on the real greatness of his temper, makes no attempt to increase his importance by low raillery or unfounded satire; whose firm temper never sinks into supine indolence, or grovelling melancholy; who only considers his profession as the means of meliorating mankind; who perseveres in the cause of truth with cheerful rectitude, and virtuous dignity; whose intellectual resources satisfactorily supply the absence of society; whose capacious mind enables him to increase his stores of useful knowledge; whose discriminating powers enable him to elucidate the subject he explores; who feels as great a delight in promoting the beneficial discoveries of others, as in executing his own; and who regards his professional contemporaries, not as jealous rivals, but as generous friends, striving to emulate each other in the noble pursuits of science, and in the laudable task of endeavoring to improve the morals of mankind.
Characters of this description, equally venerable and happy, are numerous in Europe, both within and without the shades of academic bowers, and afford examples which, notwithstanding the tribe of errors and absurdities solitude occasionally engenders, should induce men of worldly pleasures to repress the antipathies they are in general inclined to feel against persons of studious and retired lives.
CHAPTER IV.
The influence of solitude on the imagination.
The powers of imagination are great; and the effects produced by them, under certain circumstances, upon the minds of men of warm and sensible tempers, extraordinary and surprising. Multitudes have been induced by perturbed imaginations, to abandon the gay and cheerful haunts of men, and to seek, in dreary desolation, comfort and repose. To such extremes has this faculty, when distorted, hurried its unhappy subjects, that they have endured the severest mortification, denied themselves the common benefits of nature, exposed themselves to the keenest edge of winter’s cold, and the most scorching rays of summer’s heat, and indulged their distempered fancies in the wildest chimeras. These dreadful effects appear, on a first view, to be owing to some supernatural cause, and they agitate our senses, and confuse the understanding, as phenomena beyond the comprehension of reason; but the wonder vanishes when the cause is coolly and carefully explored; and the extravagances are traced up to their real source, and natural organization of man. The wild ideas of the hermit Anthony, who, in his gloomy retreat, fancied that Beelzebub appeared to him in the form of a beautiful female to torture his senses, and disturb his repose, originated in his natural character and disposition. His distempered fancy conjured up a fiend, which, in fact, existed in his unsubdued passions and incontinent desires.
… From the enchanting cup
Which fancy holds to all, the unwary thirst
Of youth oft swallows a Circæan draught,
That sheds a baleful tincture o’er the eye