well the aspect and arrangement of the room; you remember where stood tables, chairs, candles; you remember the pattern of the grate, often vacantly studied.  I think every one must look back with great interest upon such days.  Life was in great measure before you, what you might do with it.  For anything you knew then, you might be a great genius; whereas if the world, even ten years later, has not yet recognized you as a great genius, it is all but certain that it never will recognize you as such at all.  And through those long winter evenings, often prolonged far into the night, not only did you muse on many problems, social, philosophical, and religious, but you pictured out, I dare say, your future life, and thought of many things which you hoped to do and to be.

A very subdued mood of thought and feeling, I think, creeps gradually over a man living such a solitary life.  I mean a man who has been accustomed to a house with many inmates.  There is something odd in the look of an apartment in which hardly a word is ever spoken.  If you speak while by yourself, it is in a very low tone; and though you may smile, I don’t think any sane man could often laugh heartily while by himself.  Think of a life in which, while at home, there is no talking and no laughing.  Why, one distinctive characteristic of rational man is cut off when laughing ceases.  Man is the only living creature that laughs with the sense of enjoyment.  I have heard, indeed, of the laughing hyena; but my information respecting it is mainly drawn from Shakspeare, who was rather a great philosopher and poet than a great naturalist.  ‘I will laugh like a hyen,’ says that great man; and as these words are spoken as a threat, I apprehend the laughter in question is of an unpleasant and umnirthful character.  But to return from such deep thoughts, let it be repeated, that the entire mood of the solitary man is likely to be a sobered and subdued one.  Even if hopeful and content, he will never be in high spirits.  The highest degree in the scale he will ever reach, may be that of quiet lightheartedness; and that will come seldom.  Jollity, or exhilaration, is entirely a social thing.  I do not believe that even Sydney Smith could have got into one of his rollicking veins when alone.  He enjoyed his own jokes, and laughed at them with extraordinary zest; but he enjoyed them because he thought others were enjoying them too.  Why, you would be terrified that your friend’s mind was going, if before entering his room you heard such a peal of merriment from within, as would seem a most natural thing were two or three cheerful companions together.  And gradually that chastened, subdued stage comes, in which a man can sit for half an hour before the fire as motionless as marble; even a man who in the society of others is in ceaseless movement.  It is an odd feeling, when you find that you yourself, once the most restless of living creatures, have come to this.  I dare say Robinson Crusoe often sat