The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand.  But she is a
puzzle-headed woman, like another.  "What do you mean by my fourth
letter, Madam Dinglibus?  Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody
Blunder?"  "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to except
a letter next packet?  Unreasonable baggage!  No, little Dingley, I am
always in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself."  "You are a
pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin,
and your 'journal' and everything.  O Lord, never saw the like, we shall
never have done."  "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish,
so everything."  Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for
his health.  He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his
prattle.  Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy
that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."
But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his
lodgings.  His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say
nothing; I am as tame as a clout."
Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in
a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
wife; so far so good.  But two hundred years is long for her to have gone
stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right.  "Better, thanks to
MD's prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private
fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor
for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all
the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious
benediction.

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization
has been kind.  But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has
given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its
shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right
foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the
case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the
nearly refined.  These has the movement of the world thronged together
into some blind by-way.
Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs.  Of many of their kingdoms they are
ignorant, but of this most ignorant.  They have not guessed that they own
for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
obscure enfranchisement.  They do not claim even the solitude of closed
corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
so much.  For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
to wish.
It lies in a perpetual distance.  England has leagues thereof,