But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable.  This result is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience.  “A man is born by the side of his father, and there he remains.”  A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member.  He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as body-garments.  Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must but coop up most men, and you undo them.  “The king lived and ate in his hall with men, and understood men,” said Selden.  When a young barrister said to the late Mr. Mason, “I keep my chamber to read law.”  “Read law!” replied the veteran, “’tis in the courtroom you must read law.”  Nor is the rule otherwise for literature.  If you would learn to write, ’tis in the street you must learn it.  Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square.  The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.  A scholar is a candle, which the love and desire of all men will light.  Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration.  His products are as needful as those of the baker or the weaver.  Society cannot do without cultivated men.  As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.

’Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance.  Concert exasperates people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone.  Here is the use of society:  it is so easy with the great to be great! so easy to come up to an existing standard!—­as easy as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden, through waves so grim before.  The benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance is the alighting of superior persons at our gate.

It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because soirees are tedious, and because the soiree finds us tedious.  A backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told me, that when he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he the better man.  And if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist.  That was society, though in the transom of a brig, or on the Florida Keys.