Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.”
More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on the obscure crime of a great criminal:—
“At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”
Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment.
The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance, the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men, is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane. “Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the crane.