Life and writings Author:Samuel Johnson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RELIGIOUS ADVANTAGES OF SOLITUDE. " Oh thou whose power o'er moving worlds presides, Whose voice created and whose wisdom guides, On darkling man in pure effu... more »lgence shine, And cheer the clouded mind with light divine. 'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast With silent confidence and holy rest: From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend, Path, motive, guide, original, and end." Boethius. The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed every thing generally supposed to confer happiness, have been forced to seek it in the shades of privacy. Though they possessed both power and riches, and were therefore surrounded by men who considered it as their chief interest to remove from them everything that might offend their ease or interrupt their pleasure, they have soon felt the languors of satiety, and found themselves unable to pursue the race of life without frequent respirations of intermediate solitude. To produce this disposition, nothing appears requisite but quick sensibility and active imagination; for, though not devoted to virtue or science, the man whose faculties enable him to make ready comparisons of the present with the past, will find such a constant recurrence of the same pleasures and troubles, the same expectations and disappointments, that he will gladly snatch an hour of retreat, to let his thoughts expatiate at large, and seek for that variety in his own ideas which the objects of sense cannot afford him. Nor will greatness or abundance exempt himfrom the importunities of this desire, since, if he is born to think, he cannot restrain himself from a thousand inquiries and speculations, which he must pursue by his own reason, and which the ...« less