This isolation would indeed be difficult to bear if it were not mitigated by certain palliatives that enable a superior mind to be healthy and active in its loneliness. The first of these is reading, which is seldom valued at its almost inestimable worth. By the variety of its records and inventions, literature continually affords the refreshment of change, not to speak of that variety which may be had so easily by a change of language when the reader knows several different tongues, and the other marvellous variety due to difference in the date of books. In fact, literature affords a far wider variety than conversation itself, for we can talk only with the living, but literature enables us to descend, like Ulysses, into the shadowy kingdom of the dead. There is but one defect in literature,--that the talk is all on one side, so that we are listeners, as at a sermon or a lecture, and not sharers in some antique symposium, our own brows crowned with flowers, and our own tongues loosened with wine. The exercise of the tongue is wanting, and to some it is an imperious need, so that they will talk to the most uncongenial human beings, or even to parrots and dogs. If we value books as the great palliative of solitude and help to mental independence, let us not undervalue those intelligent periodicals that keep our minds modern and prevent us from living altogether in some other century than our own. Periodicals are a kind of correspondence more easily read than manuscript and involving no obligation to answer. There is also the great palliative of occasional direct correspondence with those who understand our pursuits; and here we have the advantage of using our own tongues, not physically, but at least in an imaginative way. A powerful support to some minds is the constantly changing beauty of the natural world, which becomes like a great and ever-present companion. I am anxious to avoid any exaggeration of this benefit, because I know that to many it counts for nothing; and an author ought not to think only of those who have his own mental constitution; but although natural beauty is of little use to one solitary mind, it may be like a living friend to another. As a paragraph of real experience is worth pages of speculation, I may say that I have always found it possible to live happily in solitude, provided that the place was surrounded by varied, beautiful, and changeful scenery, but that in ugly or even monotonous places I have felt society to be as necessary as it was welcome. Byron's expression,-- "I made me friends of mountains," and Wordsworth's, "Nature never did betray The heart that loved her,"