From the point of view of work, too, it is undeniably delightful.  I need never suspend a train of thought; I can write till I have finished a subject.  There is never the abominable necessity of stopping in the middle of a sentence, with the prospect of having laboriously to recapture the mood; and it is the same with reading.  If I am interested in a book, I can read on till I am satiated.  Never before in my life have I had the chance of reading, as Theocrite praised God, “morning, evening, noon, and night.”  But now, if I get really absorbed in a volume, I can let the whole story, tragedy or comedy, open before me, take its course, and draw to a close.  The result is that I find I can apprehend a book in a way that I have never apprehended one before, in its entirety; one can enter wholly and completely into the mind of an author, into the progress of a biography; so that to read a book now is like sitting out a play.

All this is very delightful; and no less delightful, too, is it, if the mood takes me, to wander off for a whole day in the country; to moon onwards entirely oblivious of time; to stop on a hill-top and survey a scene, to turn into a village church and sit long in the cool gloom; to seek out the heart of a copse, all carpeted with spring flowers, and to lie on a green bank, with the whisper of the leaves in one’s ear; or to sit beside a stream, near a crystal pool, half-hidden in sedges, and to see hour by hour what goes on in the dim waterworld.  I do not mean to say that it would not be pleasanter to share one’s rambles with a congenial companion; but it is not easy to find one; either there are differences of opinion, or the subtle barriers of age to overleap, or one is conscious that there are regions of one’s mind in which a friend will inevitably and fretfully miss his way—­there are not many friends, for anyone, to whom his mind can lie perfectly and unaffectedly open; and thus, though I do not hesitate to say that I would prefer the society of the perfect friend to my loneliness, yet I prefer my loneliness to the incursions of the imperfect friend.

Then at the close of day there is a prospect of a long, quiet evening; one can go to bed when one wishes, with the thought of another unclouded and untroubled day before one.  Liberty is, after all, the richest gift that life can give.

And now, having made this panegyric on solitude, I will be just and fair-minded, and I will say exactly what I have found the disadvantages to be.

In the first place, though I do not grow morbid, I find a loss of proportion creeping over me.  I attach an undue importance to small things.  A troublesome letter, which in a busy life one would answer and forget, rattles in the mind like a pea in a bladder.  A little incident—­say, for instance, that one has to find fault with a servant—­assumes altogether unreal importance.  In a busy life one would make up one’s mind as well as one could, and act.  But here it is not easy to make up one’s