of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later
in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and
never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at
this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
[I abridge here Tolstoi's description] the mountains with their wooded
slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze
caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun
rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the
dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful
rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually
with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his
situation grew graver.... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and
that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of
existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need,
but of our abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers
paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and,
beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into
the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament,
filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he
thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they
have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he
smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]

[M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
with abstract conceptions, and glib with verba