and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic
alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a
kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of
cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes
its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry
of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man
on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea:
the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from
the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen
tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.
It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day,
to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think
how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship
on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still
to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape:
everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one
horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been,
as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood
of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say
that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more
solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great
Might-Not-Have-Been.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order
and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship.
That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there
were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should
be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.
The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: