To the thoughtless and those of shallow intellect solitude is inseparable from loneliness. There is, for them, something terrible in the thought of being debarred, even temporarily, from the society of their fellow-beings. 'Retirement,' says Disraeli, 'to the frivolous is a vast desert; to the man of genius it is the enchanted garden of Armida.' And for 'man of genius' I would substitute 'man of literary pursuits.'
There is a pleasant story told of a monk who lived in the monastery of St. Honorat, which is situated on one of the Lerine Islands, off the coast of Provence. Possessed of a mind which, in the larger world, would indubitably have become an influence in the artistic progress of mankind, he found the sole outlet for its expression in the painting of those exquisite miniatures which are at once the delight and the despair of a more modern age. But it was not in the scriptorium nor was it in the bestiaries or the examples of his predecessors that he acquired his art. Every year, in the spring and autumn, he would go alone to one of the delicious islands of Hyères, where there was a small hermitage. Here he would spend the weeks, not altogether in prayer and fasting, but in making friends with the birds and small animals that resorted there; studying their gestures, plumage, and colours, that he might reproduce them faithfully on the vellum of his missals and devotional books. Surely he learnt more on this deserted island than was possible at that time in the richest library in France.
There is another kind of solitude, however, which can afford consolation to the soul as deep and as lasting as that afforded by the woods, the hills, the moors, the islands, those
'Waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be'--
and that is, the solitude engendered by a deep communion with books. For, if our paths lie amid the toil and turmoil of the world, and if it be impossible for us to seek seclusion amid the wastes, where else than in a library can we obtain that mental solitude so necessary for the nourishing of our literary spirit?
Roger Ascham, sick at heart with long parting from his beloved books, writes to Sir William Cecil from Brussels in 1553, to beg that 'libertie to lern, and leysor to wryte,' which his beloved Cambridge alone could afford him. 'I do wel perceyve,' he says, 'their is no soch quietnesse in England, nor pleasur in strange contres, as even in S. Jons Colledg, to kepe company with the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Tullie.' And he goes on to say, 'Thus I, first by myn own natur, . . . lastly caulled by quietnesse, thought it good to couche myself in Cambridge ageyn.'