All her life that she could remember the girl had lived so, all her life she had but to lift her eyes above her feet to gaze into the infinite; yet in the irony of fate never until this moment, the moment when of all she should have been the happiest, did the immensity of this solitude appeal to her so, did appreciation of the terrible, haunting loneliness it concealed touch her with its grip.

Yet, as Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids fair to be the final religion of the modern world.

But oh, your solitude doth cloy!

It knew not the fostering smiles of a friend, Or the dew-drops of pity on sorrow that 'tend; In its solitude drooping, like one in despair, It shrunk 'neath the blast of the wintry air.

The mound whence the violet peepsand the cell Where the fox-glove in solitude grows.

The isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his private experience, and results from his original faculties and the special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have been determined.

In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wild waste there still is a tree; And a bird in the solitude singing, That speaks to my spirit of thee.