mystic, though uncreative, centre of goodness? Surely, his influence, his Me alone considered, is living and benign, and though it is not life-giving. He is a flickering taper under a bushel; and this, billah , were better than the pissasphaltum-souls which bushels of quackery and pretence can not hide. But alas, that a good man by nature should be so weak as to surrender himself entirely to a lot of bad men. For the monks, my brother Hermit, being a silk worm in its cocoon, will asphyxiate the larva after its work is done, and utilise the silk. Ay, after the Larva dies, they pickle and preserve it in their chapel for the benefit of those who sought its oracles in life. Let the beef-packers of America take notice; the monks of my country are in the market with ‘canned hermits!’
“And this Larva, be it remembered, is not subject to decay; a saint does not decompose in the flesh like mortal sinners. One of these, I have been told, dead fifty years ago and now canonised, can be seen yet in one of the monasteries of North Lebanon, keeping well his flesh and bones together—divinely embalmed. It has been truly said that the work of a good man never dies; and these leathery hermits continue in death as in life to counsel and console the Faithful.
“In the past, these Larvae, not being cultivated for the market, continued their natural course of development and issued out of their silk prisons full fledged moths. But those who cultivate them today are in sore need. They have masses and indulgences to sell; they have big bills to pay. But whether left to grow their wings or not, their solitude is that of a cocoon larva, narrow, stale, unprofitable to the world. While that of a philosopher, a Thoreau, for instance, might be called Nature’s filter; and one, issuing therefrom benefited in every sense, morally, physically, spiritually, can be said to have been filtered through Solitude.”
“The study of life at a distance is inutile; the study of it at close range is defective. The only method left, therefore, and perhaps the true one, is that of the artist at his canvas. He works at his picture an hour or two,