Like the physical obstacles, the mists, the snows and bleak winds, which have hardened the fibre of northern men, diffidence as an obstacle to ease has its place among the causes of strong character; and those who appear at a first glance weak and ineffectual as Hamlet, will often in the light of knowledge be found guided by the most inflexible moral determination. They see, as in a mirage, peace supreme and adorable, but may not tread the hermit's path that leads to her dwelling. Only a religious vow might justify the abandonment of the human struggle, and even that appears desertion. The stern genius of the North grudges immurement, even to great piety, remembering that Christ himself remained but forty days in the desert and then returned to deliver the world. If he had remained there all his life, and never met the Pharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have rejected his law. For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than for starving Tantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been foredoomed to failure. If shyness is thus affected by climate and geography, its birth and growth are also conditioned by historical causes. Just as it is the peculiar failing of northern and western peoples, so it is the creation of comparatively modern times; it had no place among the classified weaknesses of men until these peoples began in their turn to make history. In Greece, where limb and thought were consentient in one grace of motion, the body was too perfect an expression of the mind to admit any consciousness of discord; the greater simplicity of a life passed largely in the open air, left no place for awkwardness in the franker converse of man with man. Moreover the seclusion of women rendered unnecessary that complicated code of manners which the freer intercourse of the sexes has built up in later times as a barrier against brutality or the unseemly selfishness of passion. In Greece the words of the witty and the wise could be heard in the market-place; good conversation was not for the few alone; and the common man might of unquestioned right approach the circle of Socrates or Plato. The sense of community was everywhere, overthrowing reserve, and propitious to the universal growth of fellowship.