their abundance, it shall still
be equally precious; and those who may see it shining over a life shall
not be able to tell whether its quickening jewels and stars were found
amid the grudging cinders of a cabin or upon the steps of a palace.

No past can be empty or squalid, no events can be wretched: the
wretchedness lies in our manner of welcoming them. And if it were true
that nothing had happened to you, that would be the most remarkable
adventure that any man ever had met with; and no less remarkable would
be the light it would shed upon you. In reality the facts, the
opportunities and possibilities, the passions, that await and invite
the majority of men, are all more or less the same. Some may be more
dazzling than others; their attendant circumstances may differ, but
they differ far less than the inward reactions that follow; and the
insignificant, incomplete event that falls on a fertile heart and brain
will readily attain the moral proportions and grandeur of an analogous
incident which, on another plane, will convulse a people.

He who should see, spread out before him, the past lives of a multitude
of men, could not easily decide which past he himself would wish to
have lived were he not able at the same time to witness the moral
results of these dissimilar and unsymmetrical facts. He might not
impossibly make a fatal blunder; he might choose an existence
overflowing with incomparable happiness and victory, that sparkle like
wonderful jewels; while his glance might travel indifferently over a
life that appeared to be empty whereas it was truly steeped to the brim
in serene emotions and lofty, redeeming thoughts whereby, though the
eye saw nothing, that life was yet rendered happy among all. For we
are well aware that what destiny has given, and what destiny holds in
reserve, can be revolutionised as utterly by thought as by great
victory or great defeat. Thought is silent; it disturbs not a pebble
on the illusory road we see; but at the crossway of the more actual
road that our secret life follows will it tranquilly erect an
indestructible pyramid; and thereupon, suddenly, every event, to the
very phenomena of earth and heaven, will assume a new direction.

In Siegfried's life, it is not the moment when he forges the prodigious
sword that is most important, or when he kills the dragon and compels
the gods from his path, or even the dazzling second when he encounters
love on the flaming mountain, bu