The love of solitude, however, cannot be considered otherwise than as an acquired taste; it must come as the result of experience and reflection, and advance with the development of the intellect as well as with the progress of age. A child will cry with fright if it be left alone even for a moment; in boyhood, solitude is a severe penance; young men are eminently sociable, and it is only the more elevated among them who from time to time wander off by themselves; but even so, a day passed in strict seclusion is no easy matter. In middle age, it is not so difficult, while to the aged, solitude seems the natural element. But in each individual, separately considered, the growth of the inclination for solitude is always in proportion to the strength of the intellect, and, according to Schopenhauer, it is never thoroughly matured until the individual becomes firmly convinced that society is the most disagreeable of all the unpleasant things in the world. To this conclusion both Petrarch and Zimmerman came in their respective works on solitude. Chamfort says somewhere, very wittily, "It is sometimes said of a man that he lives alone and does not care for society; this is very much the same as saying that he does not care for exercise, because he does not make excursions at night in the forest of Bondy." In short, all those whom Prometheus has fashioned from his finer clay have brought testimony of like purport. To Schopenhauer a desire for solitude was a sure indication of aristocratic tastes. "Every blackguard," he says, "is pitiably sociable, but true nobility is detected in the man who finds no pleasure in the companionship of others, and who, in preferring solitude to society, gradually acquires the conviction that, save in rare exceptions, there is little choice between isolation and vulgarity." Angelus Silesius, whose name has descended to us in a halo of Christian tenderness, bears witness to the truth of this theory, "Though solitude is hard, yet the refined Will still in ev'ry place a desert find." It is especially in old age, when one has ceased to expect anything in particular from the generality of mankind, when one has become pretty well satisfied that in the long run men do not improve on acquaintance, and when one is usually divested of those illusions which make the companionship of others seem desirable,--it is at this period that the taste for solitude, which heretofore has demanded a succession of struggles, becomes at once natural and matter of fact. One feels, then, as much at ease therein as the fish does at high water.