I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts,
finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse,
finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures
to be drawn from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence
because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures
which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot,
with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--
a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if
the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation.
If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some
uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really
is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand.
So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means;
so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long
as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship.
Add another figure and the picture is less human--not more so.
One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolise
human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you
wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky.
Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we
call our day there is but one star in the sky--a large,
fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid;
six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of Giotto is sublime;
a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry