And who are these with whom you, my solitary student, are associated? They represent every calling in life, and almost every grade, social and intellectual. Here are lawyers, judges, physicians, clergymen, doctors of divinity, college graduates, literally by the thousand, who seek through our course to review the studies of other and earlier years. Here are seminary and high school graduates, and people old and young who dropped out of the grammar school when they were too young to understand their folly in doing so. Here are business men, mechanics and farmers who have been prospered, and who covet now a measure of culture to fit them for society, that their money may gain for them and their families more than a mere social recognition. Here are mothers good and true, who do not want to part hands with sons and daughters as they enter the higher schools, but who propose by our course of reading to keep in the literary and scientific world where their children are to be at home. Here are people of “low degree,” who toil for bread, with lengthened hours of service, that they may help those who are dependent upon them. They are in shops and kitchens, and have souls that would put honor into palaces. They want outlook as they go weighted down through busy and weary years. They do not expect always to be slaves to society and circumstance. There is blood-royal in every heart-beat, and power to hold princedoms in some near future. So, despised of men who live, they hold converse through books with gifted and kingly souls who, though dead, yet live, and who work in other kingly souls. There are many of these disguised princes and princesses in your Circle. Here too are sufferers in homes of bereavement and pain, where arms are empty and hearts are full, where love calls but receives no answer, where disease binds the body but leaves the mind free to grieve over its loss; where lack of work gives place to temptation, and renders occupation of some sort a moral and religious necessity; where worldliness, that makes the soul barren, needs thoughtfulness to moisten, beautify and fructify the life. In such great and gracious companionship you sit down for solitary study. Dismiss the thought, therefore, that this is solitude. Reach out your soul to greet the currents of invisible and loving influence that pour in upon you from every quarter.