rising one above another, by such a gentle and easy ascent, that the little transitions and deviations from one species to another are almost insensible." Consistently with his approved character as a moral writer, Addison is careful to add to these considerations the consequence which he takes to be naturally deducible from them; namely, that if the scale of being rises by such a regular progress so high as man, we may, by a parity of reason, suppose that it still proceeds gradually through those beings which are of a superior nature to him.

But here we may conclude, without a conclusion, in the comprehensive style of Mr. Henry Taylor's hero:

Then I considered life in all its forms,

Of vegetables first, next zoophytes,

The tribe that dwells upon the confine strange

'Tween plants and fish; some are there from their mouth
Spit out their progeny, and some that breed

By suckers from their base or tubercles,
Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad,
Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish
That taken from its element at once

Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid ;-so from these,
Through many a tribe of less equivocal life,
Dividual or insect, up I ranged

From sentient to percipient-small advance—
Next to intelligent, to rational next,

So to half-spiritual human-kind,

And what is more, is more than man may know.

V.

Solitude in Crowds.

IR WALTER SCOTT calls it a remarkable effect of

SIR

such extensive wastes as the desolate region he describes beyond the woods of Tillietudlem, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus, he observes, the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual traveller, whose solitary course is through a thriving and cultivated country.

This is one kind of Solitude in Crowds; and one that might invite and repay illustrative comment. But it is not the one we here propose to consider. The Solitude in Crowds here intended is that which a man feels who is an utter stranger in the heart of a great city, a refugee, an outcast, a recluse, a pariah, any way a sternly-sequestered solitary, whose sense of solitude is intensified by, and indeed depends upon, the seething life that bubbles all around him ; the myriad forms that buzz about him daily like bees, and compass him in on every side.

With Valeria before the ducal palace, he may feel and say, as thronging passengers jostle and ignore him,

None speak to me :

The crowded street, and solid flow of men,

Dissolves before my shadow, and is closed.

Practically it is the case of the pious Æneas, when, mirabile dictu, he infert se

Per medios, miscetque viris; neque cernitur ulli.

Like the eccentric experimentalist in Mr. Hawthorne's story, of whom we read that "the life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his," for he took to living a hidden life in the bustle of the city, where the crowd swept by, and saw him not; and though always beside his wife, and at his hearth, yet, concealing himself as it was his wild whim to do, he must never feel the warmth of the one, nor the affection of the other.

It is when ill-starred Roderick, the last of the Goths, has escaped from the thronged streets to the open fields that solitude ceases, not begins, to oppress him :

And when he reach'd

The open fields, and found himself alone
Beneath the starry canopy of heaven,
The sense of solitude, so dreadful late,
Was then repose and comfort.

So again the poet pictures him amid other scenes surrounded by exulting mountaineers, who would fain see him rejoicing with them. But

The joy which every man reflected saw
From every face of all the multitude,
And heard in every voice, in every sound,
Reach'd not the King. Aloof from sympathy,
He from the solitude of his own soul
Beheld the busy scene.

Almost a pendent to which may be found in so contrary a character as Churchill's Apicius :

When the glass goes round,

Quick-circling, and the roofs with mirth resound,

Sober he sits, and silent—all alone

Though in a crowd, and to himself scarce known.

There are wounds, says Elia, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect he means that which a man enjoyeth by himself. "The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds," but nowhere, according to Charles Lamb, so absolutely as in a Quaker's Meeting. Those first hermits, says he, did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. And so again "the Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness." This is, so to speak, a really social and sociable solitude, sympathy in solitude, rather than the solitude of sympathy. In sheer contrast with it is that solitude in crowds which comes with a felt lack of sympathy:

Alone in crowds to wander on,

And feel that all the charm is gone
Which voices dear and eyes beloved
Shed round us once, where'er we roved-
This, this the doom must be

Of all who've loved, and lived to see

The few bright things they thought would stay
For ever near them, die away.

In the busiest thoroughfares of Liverpool it was that, pointing out the redundancy of life to Sam Slick, "This," said old Mr. Hopewell, ❝is solitude. It is in a place like this that

you feel yourself to be an isolated being, where you are surrounded by multitudes who have no sympathy with you, to whom you are not only wholly unknown, but not one of whom you have ever seen before.

"The solitude of the vast American forest is not equal to this. Encompassed by the great objects of nature, you recognise nature's God everywhere; you feel His presence, and rely on His protection. Everything in a city is artificial, the predominant idea is man; and man, under circumstances like the present, is neither your friend nor protector. You form no part of the social system here. Gregarious by nature, you cannot associate; dependent, you cannot attach yourself; a rational being, you cannot interchange ideas. In seeking the wilderness you enter the abode of solitude, and are naturally and voluntarily alone. On entering a city, on the contrary, you enter the residence of man, and if you are forced into isolation there, to you it is worse than a desert."

So discourses the old pastor; and adds, that he knows nothing so depressing as this feeling of unconnected individuality, amidst the dense population of a Liverpool or London. One is reminded of the solo, or soliloquy, of Marcello, in Mr. Lovell Beddoes' unfinished drama :

Then, who hath solitude, like mine, that is not
The last survivor of a city's plague,

Eating the mess he cook'd for his dead father?
Who is alone but I? there's fellowship

In churchyards and in hell: but I!..

Or again of Mr. Dickens's description of Rudge the murderer, from rural solitudes plunging into the back ways, lanes, and courts of the city by night; a situation which leads to the