of Tyana;[1] and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.[2] The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo;[3] because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighbourhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly that it is a mere[4] and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.[5]
A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart,
- ↑ Apollonius was born at Tyana, Cappadocia, and lived from about 4 B.C. to about 97 A.D. He was a Pythagorean philosopher and reputed magician and wonder-worker. Divine honors were paid to Apollonius in the 3d century and his bust was placed by Alexander Severus in his lararium with those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Christ.
- ↑ "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." I. Corinthians xiii. 1.
- ↑ A great city is a great solitude. Erasmi Adagia.
- ↑ Mere. Absolute, utter, whole. "It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant general, that, upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into triumph." Shakspere. Othello. ii. 2.
- ↑ Humanity. Human nature; man in the abstract. "Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor Turk, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made them, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably." Shakspere. Hamlet. iii. 2.
