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 the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship.  That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe.  It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.  The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck:  and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.  I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton’s Eden):  I hoarded the hills.  For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true.  This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:  for there cannot be another one.

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things.  These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine.  These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think:  that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now.  I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself.  It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.  But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better