e a small guardsman.
The moment you really see an elephant you can call it "Tiny."
If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it.
These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing;
but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond
of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often
did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel
that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling
the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there
was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious
care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life.
They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift.
For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars
were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun
and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and
one shilling.

These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour
and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic
alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a
kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of
cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes
its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry
of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man
on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea:
the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from
the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen
tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.
It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day,
to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think
how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship
on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still
to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape:
everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one
horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been,
as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood
of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say
that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more
solid and startling fact that any man in