pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust.  “Hech! it is a sad sight!” says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars.  And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of ‘awful inner emptiness’ from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils.  What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore?  Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance and importance.  But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with?  There is no receipt which one can follow.  Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways.  It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.  Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo.  The place is horrible.  Rats and wet and mould possess it.  His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy.  But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned before.  He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern.  He has religious visions.  He sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns.  And thinking, on the last day of July, of the festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself:  “All these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world:  from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of God.  And then I said to myself, ’Oh, how much more happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!’"[L]

    [L] Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is Tolstoi.  They throb all through his novels.  In his ‘War and Peace,’ the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.  During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat.  Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life’s values.  “Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty,