The simple joy we get from ‘fooling among boats’ on a summer day, the thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or art, or religion.  And why is it—­to come closer to our theme—­that the round or the whirling have such attraction for us?  What is the secret of the fascination of the circle?  Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power?  I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy.  Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of the flying sparks!  Why, he does ’what some men dream of all their lives’!  Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels, colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:  there may—­who knows?—­have been a certain pleasure in being broken on the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another curious example of the fascination of the circle.  It would take a whole volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in history, and, even more significant, in language.  We all know, or think we know, that the world is round—­

  ’This orb—­this round
  Of sight and sound,’

as Mr. Quiller Couch sings—­though I remember a porter at school who was sure that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet’s

  ’How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
  Seem to me all the uses of this world!’

was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare’s secret belief in his theory.  Many of the things we love most are round.  Is not money, according to the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most in demand described as ‘all-round men’?  Nor are all-round women without their admirers.  Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in cycles—­though, alas! not on them.  The ballet and the bicycle are popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be ‘roundabout.’

Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at all, when on a large scale impresses us so much?  What is the secret of the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?  Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no man is knighted for climbing a molehill.  One little drop of water and one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as ’the mighty ocean’ or ‘the beauteous land’ to which they contribute.  A balloon is no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable than an average steam-launch.  Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail, yet, given a snail’s pace to start with, an express train follows as a matter of course.  Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.  Precisely the same materials,