way to love anything is to
realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong
and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much
otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly
exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and
beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you
wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a
moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's image
is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of
all visible things--wink the other eye.

VIII. The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town
of Besancon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horse-shoe of
river. You may learn from the guide books that it was the birthplace of
Victor Hugo, and that it is a military station with many forts, near the
French frontier. But you will not learn from guide books that the very
tiles on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate colour
than the tiles of all the other towns of the world; that the tiles look
like the little clouds of some strange sunset, or like the lustrous
scales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in this
town the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some way
attractive and even elvish, a carved face at a street corner, a gleam of
green fields through a stunted arch, or some unexpected colour for the
enamel of a spire or dome.

.....

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours so simple
and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together and make a fairy
tale. I sat down for a little outside a cafe with a row of little toy
trees in front of it, and presently the driver of a fly (as we should
call it) came to the same place. He was one of those very large and dark
Frenchmen, a type not common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian
Frenchman, huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was
a sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but
English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two
nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this
Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--as if pleasure
were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the
a