on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities,
the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind
of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all
the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in
this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental
way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and
importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital
significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There
is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it
often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from
out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.
Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of
adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a
dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet
and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out,
apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never
turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in
the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All
these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the
world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of
God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this
present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'"[L]

[L] Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
Tolstoi. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the
hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.
During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through
much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery
assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of
life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was
hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy,
and