for two or three hours together in his cave, without stirring hand or foot.  The vital principle grows weak when isolated.  You must have a number of embers together to make a warm fire; separate them, and they will soon go out and grow cold.  And even so, to have brisk, conscious, vigorous life, you must have a number of lives together.  They keep each other warm.  They encourage and support each other.  I dare say the solitary man, sitting at the close of a long evening by his lonely fireside, has sometimes felt as though the flame of life had sunk so low that a very little thing would be enough to put it out altogether.  From the motionless limbs, from the unstrung hands, it seemed as though vitality had ebbed away, and barely kept its home in the feeble heart.  At such a time some sudden blow, some not very violent shock, would suffice to quench the spark for ever.  Reading the accounts in the newspapers of the cold, hunger, and misery which our poor soldiers suffered in the Crimea, have you not thought at such a time that a hundredth part of that would have been enough to extinguish you?  Have you not wondered at the tenacity of material life, and at the desperate grasp with which even the most wretched cling to it?  Is it worth the beggar’s while, in the snow-storm, to struggle on through the drifting heaps towards the town eight miles off, where he may find a morsel of food to half-appease his hunger, and a stone stair to sleep in during the night?  Have not you thought, in hours when you were conscious of that shrinking of life into its smallest compass—­that retirement of it from the confines of its territory, of which we have been thinking—­that in that beggar’s place you would keep up the fight no longer, but creep into some quiet corner, and there lay yourself down and sleep away into forgetfulness?  I do not say that the feeling is to be approved, or that it can in any degree bear being reasoned upon; but I ask such readers as have led solitary lives, whether they have not somelimes felt it?  It is but the subdued feeling which comes of loneliness carried out to its last development.  It is the highest degree of that influence which manifests itself in slow steps, in subdued tones of voice, in motionless musings beside the fire.

Another consequence of a lonely life in the case of many men, is an extreme sensitiveness to impressions from external nature.  In the absence of other companions of a more energetic character, the scenes amid which you live produce an effect on you which they would fail to produce if you were surrounded by human friends.  It is the rule in nature, that the stronger impression makes you unconscious of the weaker.  If you had charged with the Six Hundred, you would not have remarked during the charge that one of your sleeves was too tight.  Perhaps in your boyhood, a companion of a turn at once thoughtful and jocular, offered to pull a hair out of your head without your feeling it.  And this he accomplished,