The Life of the Spider
be acquired, certain of those innate good poetic virtues which cause his sure and supple prose, devoid of artificial ornament and yet adorned with simple and as it were unintentional charm, to take its place among the excellent and lasting prose of the day, prose of the kind that has its own atmosphere, in which we breathe gratefully and tranquilly and which we find only around masterpieces.
Lastly, there was needed—and this was not the least requirement of the work—a mind ever ready to cope with the riddles which, among those little objects, rise up at every step, as enormous as those which fill the skies and perhaps more numerous, more imperious and more strange, as though nature had here given a freer scope to her last wishes and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. He shrinks from none of those boundless problems which are persistently put to us by all the inhabitants of that tiny world where mysteries are heaped up in a denser and more bewildering fashion than in any other. He thus meets and faces, turn by turn, the redoubtable questions of instinct and intelligence, of the origin of species, of the harmony or the accidents of the universe, of
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