IV. SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY; AND THE DEBATABLE LAND BETWEEN. "But when an eager listener, stealing behind Irving and Halleck at an evening party, found them talking of shoe-leather! and a breathless devotee of Thackeray, sitting opposite to him at the dinner-table, saw those Delphian lips unclosed only to utter the words, Another potato, if you please!' -they had revelations which might cast a dreadful suspicion over the nature of the whole tribe of authors. 66 I would not have the reader imagine that the members of the Echo Club are represented by either of these extremes. They are authors, of different ages and very unequal places in public estimation. It would never occur to them to seat themselves on selfconstructed pyramids, and speak as if The Ages were listening; yet, like their brethren of all lands and all times, the staple of their talk is literature."BAYARD TAYLOR. THE hunger of a great and selfsufficing mind for the charms of re tirement is sometimes pathetic in the extreme. We do not refer here to that romantic longing of poetic boyhood, such as we find expressed by Kirke White in one of his sonnets: "Give me a cottage on some Cambrian wild, Where, far from cities, I may spend my days: And by the beauties of the scene beguiled, May pity man's pursuits, and shun his ways. While on the rock I mark the browsing goat, List to the mountain torrent's distant noise, Or the hoarse bittern's solitary note, I shall not want the world's delusive joys; But, with my little scrip, my book, my lyre, Shall think my lot complete, nor covet more ; And when with time shall wane the vital fire, I'll raise my pillow on the desert shore, And lay me down to rest where the wild wave Shall make sweet music o'er my lonely grave." This is all, without doubt, very pretty and extremely touching; but is it healthy? Although Keats was mawkish after a manner, his criticism of life was sometimes remarkably true, if not very severe. "The imagination of a boy," he writes in his preface to Endymion, "is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness and all the thousand bitters." The reality which dogs the footsteps of excessive and too far-reaching fancy is sometimes as utterly cruel and ridiculous as that we find pictured in a certain Sequel to Rogers' little poem, The Wish, which, in a frolicsome moment, some sportive brain caused to dance into existence, and which is so complete in its way that we are constrained to give it here: * THE WISH. (By Rogers.) "Mine be a cot beside a hill, A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear; * See Athenæum, April 14, 1888. "The swallow oft beneath the thatch Shall twitter from her clay-built nest; And share my meals, a welcome guest. "Around the ivied porch shall stray Each fragrant flower that sips the dew, Where first our marriage vows were given, THE WISH ENJOYED. (The Sequel.) "So damp my cot beside the hill The bees have ceased to soothe my ear; Is turned to please the miller near. Beggars and thieves disturb my rest. "From out the ivy at my door Earwigs and snails are always crawling ; Lucy now spins and sings no more, Because the hungry brats are squalling. "To village church with priestly pride In vain the pointing spire is given; Lucy with Wesley for her guide Has found a shorter road to heaven." The shallow sentiment of seclusion is very different to the knowledge on the part of great thinkers of the ab solute worth of solitude and rest as aids to their life-work. There is nothing, for instance, of "life's young dream" about the utterances of Carlyle on this subject, which we find in his correspondence with Emerson. "Pain and poverty," he writes, "are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison. God deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! On the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as rest?" And again: "The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate; joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where Fate tethers me in life." "Solitude," he continues in another letter, "is what |