ins of the crumpled rose leaf very
often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very
clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking
that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do no deny that
molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this
evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more
invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No
one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a
hassock. William III. died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose
that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a
mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask
a happy man (not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences,
and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive
poverty 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