It happened that I had that emotion.  When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a lifeguardsman.  The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small.  If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable.  But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman.  The moment you really see an elephant you can call it “Tiny.”  If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it.  These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe.  But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive.  I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.  Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large.  For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life.  They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift.  For economy is far more romantic than extravagance.  To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.

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.