The Certainty Of Being Alone

Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees, tr. J. Safford Fiske (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 149-51:

This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture; no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows, perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There the faint trace of an ancient pathway may with difficulty be made out. Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its hold upon you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought, it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth—a sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like the gentle murmur of an Æolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.

Life's Endless Toil

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done (composed in 1844, and pub. in 1845 as an intro. to a compiled volume of lyrics Longfellow himself did; it was prefixed to a collection he titled The Waif):

                The day is done, and the darkness
                      Falls from the wings of Night,
                As a feather is wafted downward
                      From an eagle in his flight.

                I see the lights of the village
                      Gleam through the rain and the mist,
                And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
                      That my soul cannot resist:

                A feeling of sadness and longing,
                      That is not akin to pain,
                And resembles sorrow only
                      As the mist resembles the rain.

                Come, read to me some poem,
                      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
                That shall soothe this restless feeling,
                      And banish the thoughts of day.

                Not from the grand old masters,
                      Not from the bards sublime,
                Whose distant footsteps echo
                      Through the corridors of Time.

                For, like strains of martial music,
                      Their mighty thoughts suggest
                Life's endless toil and endeavour;
                      And to-night I long for rest.

                Read from some humbler poet,
                      Whose songs gushed from his heart,
                As showers from the clouds of summer,
                      Or tears from the eyelids start;

                Who, through long days of labour,
                      And nights devoid of ease,
                Still heard in his soul the music
                      Of wonderful melodies.

                Such songs have power to quiet
                      The restless pulse of care,
                And come like the benediction
                      That follows after prayer.

                Then read from the treasured volume
                      The poem of thy choice,
                And lend to the rhyme of the poet
                      The beauty of thy voice.

                And the night shall be filled with music,
                      And the cares, that infest the day,
                Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
                      And as silently steal away.