into it from time to time as benefactors:  and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul, in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.  The high advantage of university-life is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and fire,—­which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not think needful at home.  We say solitude, to mark the character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two, or more than two, it is happier, and not less noble.  “We four,” wrote Neander to his sacred friends, “will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a civitas Dei, whose foundations are forever friendship.  The more I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions.  Their very presence stupefies me.  The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of all existence.”

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities, that more catholic and humane relations may appear.  The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal:  and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public than in his private quality.  Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in the journals and in conversation.  From these it is easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the main, unfavorable.  The poet, as a craftsman, is interested only in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just; and the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the critic.  But the poet cultivated becomes a stockholder in both companies,—­say Mr. Curfew,—­in the Curfew stock, and in the humanity stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew as his interest in the former gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew.  For the depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock.  As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought.  I must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis.  But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the people than to me.  We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course:  but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men!  Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at every object for itself, without affection.  Though an egotist a l’outrance, he could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds, and give a just opinion.  A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade gains largely