Yes, there must be surprise in the books that I keep in the worn case at my elbow, the surprise of a new personality perceiving for the first time the beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of truth.  It doesn’t matter at all whether the writer is a poet, a scientist, a traveller, an essayist or a mere daily space-maker, if he have the God-given grace of wonder.

“What on earth are you laughing about?” cries Harriet from the sitting-room.

When I have caught my breath, I say, holding up my book: 

“This absurd man here is telling of the adventures of a certain chivalrous Knight.”

“But I can’t see how you can laugh out like that, sitting all alone there.  Why, it’s uncanny.”

“You don’t know the Knight, Harriet, nor his squire Sancho.”

“You talk of them just as though they were real persons.”

“Real!” I exclaim, “real!  Why they are much more real than most of the people we know.  Horace is a mere wraith compared with Sancho.”

And then I rush out.

“Let me read you this,” I say, and I read that matchless chapter wherein the Knight, having clapped on his head the helmet which Sancho has inadvertently used as a receptacle for a dinner of curds and, sweating whey profusely, goes forth to fight two fierce lions.  As I proceed with that prodigious story, I can see Harriet gradually forgetting her sewing, and I read on the more furiously until, coming to the point of the conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, having yawned, “threw out some half yard of tongue wherewith he licked and washed his face,” Harriet begins to laugh.

“There!” I say triumphantly.

Harriet looks at me accusingly.

“Such foolishness!” she says.  “Why should any man in his senses try to fight caged lions!”

“Harriet,” I say, “you are incorrigible.”

She does not deign to reply, so I return with meekness to my room.

* * * * *

The most distressing thing about the ordinary fact writer is his cock-sureness.  Why, here is a man (I have not yet dropped him out of the window) who has written a large and sober book explaining life.  And do you know when he gets through he is apparently much discouraged about this universe.  This is the veritable moment when I am in love with my occupation as a despot!  At this moment I will exercise the prerogative of tyranny: 

“Off with his head!”

I do not believe this person though he have ever so many titles to jingle after his name, nor in the colleges which gave them, if they stand sponsor for that which he writes, I do not believe he has compassed this universe.  I believe him to be an inconsequent being like myself—­oh, much more learned, of course—­and yet only upon the threshold of these wonders.  It goes too deep—­life—­to be solved by fifty years of living.  There is far too much in the blue firmament, too many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain.  We are not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the “scheme of things entire.”  This is no place for weak pessimism—­this universe.  This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fine adventure!  What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, are insignificant compared with that which may be known.