the world. Never in the
solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape
Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seen
anything but a little circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he was
alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes. The sailor has
nothing but his mast, indeed. And but for his mast he would be isolated
in as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains.

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them so
perpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flight
with flight.

A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offing
hardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might think
something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the
centre of it.

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady,
so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further sea lies away,
hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding world, with its looks
serene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, its
signs and communications of light, gathers down and pauses. This flock
of birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth. The
Cardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands. Farewell to
the most delicate horizon.

HABITS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Education might do somewhat to control the personal habits for which
ungenerous observant men are inclined to dislike one another. It has
done little. As to literature, this has had the most curiously diverse
influence upon the human sensitiveness to habit. Tolstoi's perception of
habits is keener than a child's, and he takes them uneasily, as a child
does not. He holds them to be the occasion, if not the cause, of hatred.
Anna Karenina, as she drank her coffee, knew that her sometime lover was
dreading to hear her swallow it, and was hating the crooking of her
little finger as she held her cup. It is impossible to live in a world
of habits with such an apprehension of habits as this.

It is no wonder that Tolstoi denies to other men unconsciousness, and
even preoccupation. With him perception never lapses, and he will not
describe a murderer as rapt away by passion from the details of the room
and the observation of himself; nor will he represent a theologian as
failing--even while he thinks out and decides the question of his
faith--to note th