But if once a man have a taste of true and happy retirement, though it be but a short hour, or day, now and then, he has found, or is beginning to find, a sure place of refuge, of blessed renewal, toward which in the busiest hours he will find his thoughts wistfully stealing.  How stoutly will he meet the buffets of the world if he knows he has such a place of retirement where all is well-ordered and full of beauty, and right counsels prevail, and true things are noted.

As a man grows older, if he cultivate the art of retirement, not indeed as an end in itself, but as a means of developing a richer and freer life, he will find his reward growing surer and greater until in time none of the storms or shocks of life any longer disturbs him.  He might in time even reach the height attained by Diogenes, of whom Epictetus said, “It was not possible for any man to approach him, nor had any man the means of laying hold upon him to enslave him.  He had everything easily loosed, everything only hanging to him.  If you laid hold of his property, he would rather have let it go and be yours than he would have followed you for it; if you laid hold of his leg he would have let go his leg:  if all of his body, all his poor body; his intimates, friends, country, just the same.  For he knew from whence he had them, and from whom and on what conditions.”

The best partners of solitude are books.  I like to take a book with me in my pocket, although I find the world so full of interesting things—­sights, sounds, odours—­that often I never read a word in it.  It is like having a valued friend with you, though you walk for miles without saying a word to him or he to you:  but if you really know your friend, it is a curious thing how, subconsciously, you are aware of what he is thinking and feeling about this hillside or that distant view.  And so it is with books.  It is enough to have this writer in your pocket, for the very thought of him and what he would say to these old fields and pleasant trees is ever freshly delightful.  And he never interrupts at inconvenient moments, nor intrudes his thoughts upon yours unless you desire it.

I do not want long books and least of all story books in the woods—­these are for the library—­but rather scraps and extracts and condensations from which thoughts can be plucked like flowers and carried for a while in the buttonhole.  So it is that I am fond of all kinds of anthologies.  I have one entitled “Traveller’s Joy,” another, “Songs of Nature,” and I have lately found the best one I know called “The Spirit of Man” by Robert Bridges, the English laureate.  Other little books that fit well in the pocket on a tramp, because they are truly companionable, are Ben Jonson’s “Timber,” one of the very best, and William Penn’s “Fruits of Solitude.”  An anthology of Elizabethan verse, given me by a friend, is also a good companion.