Living alone, your nerves are not jarred by discordant voices; you are to a great degree free from annoying interruptions; and if you be of an orderly turn of mind, you are not put about by seeing things around you in untidy confusion.  You do not find leaves torn out of books; nor carpets strewn with fragments of biscuits; nor mantelpieces getting heaped with accumulated rubbish.  Sawdust, escaped from maimed dolls, is never sprinkled upon your table-covers; nor ink poured over your sermons; nor leaves from these compositions cut up for patterns for dolls’ dresses.  There is an audible quiet which pervades the house, which is favourable to thought.  The first evenings, indeed, which you spent alone in it, were almost awful for their stillness; but that sort of nervous feeling soon wears off.  And then you have no more than the quiet in which the mind’s best work must be done, in the case of average men.

And there can be little doubt, that when you gird up the mind, and put it to its utmost stretch, it is best that you should be alone.  Even when the studious man comes to have a wife and children, he finds it needful that he should have his chamber to which he may retire when he is to grapple with his task of head-work; and he finds it needful, as a general rule, to suffer no one to enter that chamber while he is at work.  It is not without meaning that this solitary chamber is called a study:  the word reminds us that hard mental labour must generally be gone through when we are alone.  Any interruption by others breaks the train of thought; and the broken end may never be caught again.  You remember how Maturin, the dramatist, when he felt himself getting into the full tide of composition, used to stick a wafer on his forehead, to signify to any member of his family who might enter his room, that he must not on any account be spoken to.  You remember the significant arrangement of Sir Walter’s library, or rather study, at Abbotsford; it contained one chair, and no more.  Yes, the mind’s best work, at the rate of writing, must be done alone.  At the speed of talking, the case is otherwise.  The presence of others will then stimulate the mind to do its best; I mean to do the best it can do at that rate of speed.  Talking with a clever man, on a subject which interests you, your mind sometimes produces material which is (for you) so good, that you are truly surprised at it.  And a barrister, addressing a judge or a jury, has to do hard mental work, to keep all his wits awake, to strain his intellect to the top of its bent, in the presence of many; but, at the rate of speed at which he does this, he does it all the better for their presence.  So with an extempore preacher.  The eager attention of some hundreds of his fellow-creatures spurs him on (if he be mentally and physically in good trim) to do perhaps the very best he ever does.  I have heard more than two or three clergymen who preach extempore (that is, who trust to the moment for the