She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept,
And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept.
Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah’s board
Gave what the seasons to the rich afford;
For she indulged,” etc.
Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, “But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying,” etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe’s Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered:
“To have this money in my purse—to know
What grief was his, and what to grief we owe;
To see him often, always to conceive