Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They commune, through their Journals, with the demons that attend them. Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing needful--to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest truth. "After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end." "I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen." He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other." He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.