“O visions ill foreseen! Better had I
Lived ignorant of future! so had borne
My part of evil only, each day’s lot
Enough to bear.”
Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope? And yet,
“With eager search to dart the soul,
Curiously vain, from pole to pole,
And from the planets’ wandering spheres
To extort the number of our years,
And whether all those years shall flow