of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words....  Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch.  When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoi’s description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays,—­his heart overflowed with emotion.  This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver....  He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance....  When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith.  The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon.  Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars.  ‘All that is mine,’ he thought.  ’All that is in me, is me!  And that is what they think they have taken prisoner!  That is what they have shut up in a cabin!’ So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]

    [M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing.  It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given.  “Crossing a bare common,” says Emerson, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear.”

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.  But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature.  We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common.  We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and joys.