I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. 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, because
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 in his, and
in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though
it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. We
meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value
for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree
on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this
frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet
at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every
night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one
another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly
less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications
. Consider the girls in a factory---never alone, hardly in their dreams
. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile
, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should
touch him. I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the
morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some
one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon
in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company
has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but
the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone
, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one
is a mock sun. god is alone---but the devil, he is far from being alone
; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than
a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel
, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Millbrook
, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower
, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.