they experience in the respect and consideration of others. What wonder,
then, that they eagerly fly from the world, which has only mortification
for their self-love, or that we find, in biography, how often the most
assiduous votaries of pleasure have become the most rigid of recluses?
For my part, I think that that love of solitude which the ancients so
eminently possessed, and which, to this day, is considered by some as
the sign of a great mind, nearly always arises from a tenderness of
vanity, easily wounded in the commerce of the rough world; and that
it is under the shadow of Disappointment that we must look for the
hermitage. Diderot did well, even at the risk of offending Rousseau,
to write against solitude. The more a moralist binds man to man, and
forbids us to divorce our interests from our kind, the more effectually
is the end of morality obtained. They only are justifiable in seclusion
who, like the Greek philosophers, make that very seclusion the means of
serving and enlightening their race; who from their retreats send forth
their oracles of wisdom, and render the desert which surrounds them
eloquent with the voice of truth. But remember, Clarence (and let my
life, useless in itself, have at least this moral), that for him who
in no wise cultivates his talent for the benefit of others; who is
contented with being a good hermit at the expense of being a bad
citizen; who looks from his retreat upon a life wasted in the difficiles
nugae of the most frivolous part of the world, nor redeems in the closet
the time he has misspent in the saloon,--remember that for him seclusion
loses its dignity, philosophy its comfort, benevolence its hope, and
even religion its balm. Knowledge unemployed may preserve us from vice;
but knowledge beneficently employed is virtue. Perfect happiness, in our
present state, is impossible; for Hobbes says justly that our nature is
inseparable from desires, and that the very word desire (the craving
for something not possessed) implies that our present felicity is not
complete. But there is one way of attaining what we may term, if not
utter, at least mortal, happiness; it is this,--a sincere and unrelaxing
activity for the happiness of others. In that one maxim is concentrated
whatever is noble in morality, sublime in religion, or unanswerable in
truth. In that pursuit we have all scope for whatever is excellent in
our hearts, and none for the petty passions which our nature is heir
to