given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its
shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right
foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the
case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the
nearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged together
into some blind by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are
ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own
for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed
corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,
landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,
and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by
miles; they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely the
dominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is loneliness
for innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages,
so many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of the
earth; no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened or the silence
marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there
before. Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be
numbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the living and
every man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light."