year, in the following stanza by the same poet:--

Tedious again to curse the drizzling day,
Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow!
Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey
The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow!

Swift's letters paint in terrifying colours a picture of solitude, and
at length his despair closed with idiotism. The amiable Gresset could
not sport with the brilliant wings of his butterfly muse, without
dropping some querulous expression on the solitude of genius. In his
"Epistle to his Muse," he exquisitely paints the situation of men of
genius:

----Je les vois, victimes du génie,
Au foible prix d'un éclat passager,
Vivre isolés, sans jouir de la vie!

And afterwards he adds,

Vingt ans d'ennuis, pour quelques jours de gloire!

I conclude with one more anecdote on solitude, which may amuse. When
Menage, attacked by some, and abandoned by others, was seized by a fit
of the spleen, he retreated into the country, and gave up his famous
Mercuriales; those Wednesdays when the literati assembled at his house,
to praise up or cry down one another, as is usual with the literary
populace. Menage expected to find that tranquillity in the country which
he had frequently described in his verses; but as he was only a poetical
plagiarist, it is not strange that our pastoral writer was greatly