Basil

Chapter 4

We are seldom able to discover under any ordinary conditions of

self-knowledge, how intimately that spiritual part of us, which is

undying, can attach to itself and its operations the poorest objects

of that external world around us, which is perishable. In the ravelled

skein, the slightest threads are the hardest to follow. In analysing

the associations and sympathies which regulate the play of our

passions, the simplest and homeliest are the last that we detect. It

is only when the shock comes, and the mind recoils before it--when joy

is changed into sorrow, or sorrow into joy--that we really discern

what trifles in the outer world our noblest mental pleasures, or our

severest mental pains, have made part of themselves; atoms which the

whirlpool has drawn into its vortex, as g