And hurls their labours to the valley deep,
For ever vain.”
But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our theme. More to the purpose is the same poet’s description of Celadon assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,—
“From his void embrace,
Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground,
A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.”
Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt. Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.
The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described by one among them as catching occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling to them who stood outside, of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, “After a long and a hard struggle—after many cares and bitter sorrows—she is tasting happiness now.” Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. “But God’s ways are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell’s happiness seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death. Mrs. Gaskell’s own career was similarly cut short, just when she was finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad says,—
“is this worldys bliss,
That changeth as the moon!