His meaning hopeless.”
The same good Providence, as Madame de Sévigné writes, that governs all, shall one day unravel all; we poor mortals being, in the meanwhile, so many all but stone-blind and utterly ignorant lookers-on. We suffer, as the author of “Thorndale” says—there is no doubt about that—and we naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony; but the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life, should be taken from some calm, impersonal point of view. “We should command the widest horizon possible. Of the great whole of humanity we see but a little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights only of the picture, sometimes only on the shadows. How very dark those shadows seem! Yet if we could embrace in our view the whole of the picture, perhaps the very darkest shadows might be recognised as effective or inevitable portions of a grand harmonious whole.” How closes Thomson his poem of “The Seasons,” drear Winter then his cue?—with the memorable lines:—
“Ye good distress’d!
Ye noble few! who here unbending stand
Beneath life’s pressure, yet bear up awhile;
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deemed evil, is no more:
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded spring encircle all.”
The theme of our part knowledge, so strictly cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, is one to which Thomson repeatedly recurs. For instance, in an earlier book:—