It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and a
thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get for
a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, it
is still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes," and a
space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place.
But the best solitude does not hide at all.

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live whole
lives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the
solitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never have a whole hour
alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another
and not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to a
vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the
unconscious loss which is futile and barren.

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the
hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible,
without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of
action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude
deferred.

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl
stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the
closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out of
sight.