Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1881 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

150 Ordered South.
perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the fresh-
ness of some pulse of air from an invisible sea,
the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the
merest nothing that sends a little shiver along,
the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's body —
not one of the least of these but has a hand
somehow in the general effect, and brings some
refinement of its own into the character of the
pleasure Ave feel.
And if the external conditions are thus varied
and subtle, even more so are those within our
own bodies. No man can find out the world,
says Solomon, from beginning to end, because
the world is in his heart ; and so it is im-
possible for any of us to understand, from be-
ginning to end, that agreement of harmonious
circumstances that creates in us the highest
pleasure of admiration, precisely because some
of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies.
After we have reckoned up all that we can see