of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping
the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find
the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg.
To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand
in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness.
As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which
stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity
of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us
that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight.
This column of mine fulfils its legitimate function.
It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic consistency,
it may even improve by the process, and during these few
days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness
or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the
astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might
pass by at any moment, and seeing me in the stork-like attitude
would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude,
"He has a leg." Notice how this famous literary phrase supports
my contention touching this isolation of any admirable thing.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect
picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg.
She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive
fact that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous
and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have
confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London.
That having had one good leg he should have another--