margin, and your ‘journal’ and everything.  O Lord, never saw the like, we shall never have done.”  “I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything.”  Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for his health.  He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his prattle.  Both women—­MD—­are rallied on their politics:  “I have a fancy that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer.”

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his lodgings.  His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.  “He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say nothing; I am as tame as a clout.”

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed wife; so far so good.  But two hundred years is long for her to have gone stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right.  “Better, thanks to MD’s prayers,” wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley’s eyes, nor for Ppt’s, nor for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious benediction.

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization has been kind.  But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined.  These has the movement of the world thronged together into some blind by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.  They do not know it is theirs.  Of many of their kingdoms they are ignorant, but of this most ignorant.  They have not guessed that they own for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no obscure enfranchisement.  They do not claim even the solitude of closed corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command so much.  For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance.  England has leagues thereof, landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods, and on uplifted hills.  Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by miles; they are to be numbered by days.  They are freshly and freely the dominion of every man for the day of his possession.  There is loneliness for innumerable solitaries.  As many days as there are in all the ages, so many solitudes are there for men.  This is the open house of the earth; no one is refused.  Nor is the space shortened or the silence marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there before.  Solitude is separate experience.  Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days, but by men themselves.  Every man of the living and every man of the dead might have had his “privacy of light.”