I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely
when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between
a man and his fellows. 'The really diligent student in one of the
crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the
desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day,
hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome. beacause he is employed;
but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone,
at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks,"
and recreate, and, as he thinks. remunerate himself for his day's solitude;
and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night
and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize
that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field,
and chopping in his woods, as the farmer ire his. and in turn seeks
the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may
be a more condensed form of it.