better for having them about you, for listening to their stories, and watching their ways.  They will sometimes interrupt you at your work, indeed, but their effect upon your moral development will be more valuable by a great deal than the pages you might have written in the time you spent with them.  Read over the following verses, which are among the latest written by Longfellow.  I do not expect that men who have no children of their own will appreciate them duly; but they seem to me among the most pleasing and touching which that pleasing poet ever wrote.  Miserable solitary beings, see what improving and softening influences you miss!

    Between the dark and the daylight,
        When the night is beginning to lower,
    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
        That is known as the Children’s Hour.

    I hear in the chamber above me
        The patter of little feet,
    The sound of a door that is opened,
        And voices soft and sweet.

    From my study I see in the lamplight,
        Descending the broad hall-stair,
    Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
        And Edith with golden hair.

    A whisper, and then a silence: 
        Yet I know by their merry eyes
    They are plotting and planning together
        To take me by surprise.

    A sudden rush from the stairway,
        A sudden raid from the hall! 
    By three doors left unguarded
        They enter my castle wall!

    They climb up into my turret,
        O’er the arms and back of my chair: 
    If I try to escape, they surround me;
        They seem to be everywhere.

    They almost devour me with kisses,
        Their arms about me entwine,
    Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
        In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

    Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
        Because you have scaled the wall,
    Such an old moustache as I am
        Is not a match for you all?

    I have you fast in my fortress,
        And will not let you depart,
    But put you down into the dungeons,
        In the round-tower of my heart.

    And there will I keep you forever,
        Yes, forever and a day,
    Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
        And moulder in dust away!

What shall be said as to the effect which a solitary life will produce upon a man’s estimate of himself?  Shall it lead him to fancy himself a man of very great importance?  Or shall it tend to make him underrate himself, and allow inferior men of superior impudence to take the wall of him?  Possibly we have all seen each effect follow from a too lonely mode of life.  Each may follow naturally enough.  Perhaps it is natural to imagine your mental stature to be higher than it is, when you have no one near with whom you may compare yourself.  It no doubt tends to take down a human being from his self-conceit,