Most musical, most melancholy”;
or on the border of a mountain stream with no noise there
“But that of falling water, friend to thought”;
or some secluded tarn whose tideless waters, like the soul stilled to all human passions, give back an undisturbed image of the sky; but oftener on some lofty crag, gray and melancholy, with scarce a spray for bird to light on, where amid heat of summer and winter frosts the hermit grew “content in heavenward musings,” like him, sung by Dante, on that stony ridge of Catria
“Sacred to the lonely Eremite,
For worship set apart and holy things.”
Every one in his hours of deepest feeling, whether of love, or grief, or devotion, has longed for some such retreat where he might nurse it in solitude. To every soul of any sensibility that has lived and suffered—and is it not all one?—it appeals with a force proportioned to the deep solitude he has already passed through, and his sense of that solitude he knows must one day be encountered. There is something healing and sustaining in this contact with nature, but it is only experienced by him who has that “inward eye which,” says Cowley, “is the bliss of solitude.”
“The common air, the earth, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.”
“But solitude, when created by God,” says Lacordaire, “has a companion from whom it is never separated: it is Poverty. To be solitary and poor is the secret of the heroic in soul. To live on a little, and with few associates; to maintain the integrity of the conscience by limiting the wants of the body, and giving unlimited satisfaction to the soul, is the means of developing every manly virtue, and that which in pagan antiquity was a rare and noble exception has become under the law of Christ an example given by multitudes.”