By Nebo’s lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab,
There lies a lonely grave.

The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.

A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself — new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

Sometimes a tall column stood alone in the wilderness, as a great thought stands alone in the soul which time and sorrow have crushed.

I have come to this lonely place, and here is this other.

There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his thin robe was heavy and chill;
For his country he sigh'd, when at twilight repairing
To wander alone by the wind-beaten hill.

Tell him I lingered alone on the shore,
Where we parted, in sorrow, to meet nevermore;
The night-wind blew cold on my desolate heart
But colder those wild words of doom,—“Ye must part.”

I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

... how they departed and hid themselves in mountains, caves, and in solitary, secluded places,

An old eagle, a blind eagle, who waits hungry and cold and still;
He seeks nothing, he fears nothing: he stands lone on a lonely hill.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace. How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the True Way. But at the far end of that valley of evil whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear! I found myself before a little hill (15) and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed already with the sweet rays of that planet whose virtue leads men straight on every road, and the shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night.

Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.

The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.