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: and when I saw the
Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.
I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are