and retires a little to study and criticise it from a distance. It is impossible to withdraw entirely from life and pretend to take an interest in it. Either like my brother Hermit in these parts, a spiritual larva in its cocoon, or like a Thoreau, who during his period of seclusion, peeped every fortnight into the village to keep up at least his practice of human speech. Else what is the use of solitude? A life of fantasy, I muse, is nearer to the heart of Nature and Truth than a life in sackcloth and ashes. …
“And yet, deeply considered, this eremitic business presents another aspect. For does not the eremite through his art of prayer and devotion, seek an ideal? Is he not a transcendentalist, at least in the German sense of the word? Is not his philosophy above all the senses, as the term implies, and common sense included? For through Mother Church, and with closed eyes, he will attain the ideal, of which my German philosopher, through the logic-mill, and with eyes open, hardly gets a glimpse.
“The devout and poetic souls, and though they walk among the crowd, live most of their lives in solitude. Through Mother Sorrow, or Mother Fancy, or Mother Church, they are ever seeking the ideal, which to them is otherwise unattainable. And whether a howler of Turabu or a member of the French Academy, man, in this penumbra of faith and doubt, of superstition and imagination, is much the same. ‘The higher powers in us,’ says Novalis, ‘which one day, as Genii, shall fulfil our will, are for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.’ And the jinn, the fairies, the angels, the muses, are as young and vivacious today as they were in the Arabian and Gaelic Ages of Romance.
“But whether Mother Church or Poetry or Philosophy or Music be the magic-medium, the result is much the same if the motive be not religiously sincere, sincerely religious, piously pure, lofty, and humane. Ay, my Larva-Hermit, with all his bigotry and straitness of soul, stands