It is a natural feeling; and a strong brain gathers strength from communing with itself or with its natural mate.

There are few great men who have not at one time or another withdrawn into solitude, and their retreat has generally been succeeded by a period of extraordinary activity.

Strong minds are often, at some time or another, exposed to doubt and uncertainty incomprehensible to a smaller intellect--due, indeed, to that very breadth of view which contemplates the same idea from a vast number of sides.

To a man so endowed, the casting-vote of some one whom he loves, and with whom he almost unconsciously sympathises, is sometimes necessary to produce action, to direct the faculties, to guide the overflowing flood of his thought into the mill-race of life's work.

Without a certain amount of prejudice to determine the resultant of its forces, many a fine intellect would expend its power in burrowing among its own labyrinths, unrecognised, misunderstood, unheard by the working-day world without.