and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to
silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart
in their chamber, and be still. Even in art and in mechanical
science, those who have done great work upon the earth have been men
given to solitary meditation. When Brindley, the engineer, it is
said, had a difficult problem to solve, he used to go to bed, and
stay there till he had worked it out. Turner, the greatest nature-
painter of this or any other age, spent hours upon hours in mere
contemplation of nature, without using his pencil at all. It is
said of him that he was seen to spend a whole day, sitting upon a
rock, and throwing pebbles into a lake; and when at evening his
fellow painters showed their day's sketches, and rallied him upon
having done nothing, he answered them, "I have done this at least:
I have learnt how a lake looks when pebbles are thrown into it."
And if this silent labour, this steadfast thought are required even
for outward arts and sciences, how much more for the highest of all
arts, the deepest of all sciences, that which involves the
questions--who are we? and where are we? who is God? and what are we
to God, and He to us?--namely, the science of being good, which
deals not with time merely, but with eternity. No retirement, no
loneliness, no period of earnest and solemn meditation, can be
misspent which helps us towards that goal.

And therefore it was that Hilarion longed to be alone; alone with
God; and with Nature, which spoke to him of God. For these old
hermits, though they neither talked nor wrote concerning scenery,
nor painted pictures of it as we do now, had many of them a clear
and intense instinct of the beauty and the meaning of outward
Nature; as Antony surely had when he said that the world around was
his book, wherein he read the mysteries of God. Hilarion seems,