What pleaseth Heaven to hide.
Dark is the abyss of Time.
But light enough to guide your steps is given;
Whatever weal or woe betide,
Turn never from the way of truth aside,
And leave the event, in holy hope, to Heaven.”
The hermit in Scott’s “Talisman,” who, after failing to read aright the fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have miscalculated his own,—withdraws from the action of the story with the reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or spy out His hidden mysteries. “We must wait His time with watching and prayer—with fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer—the proud prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken! I go hence humble in mine ignorance,” etc. In Scott’s other and less popular Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham’s offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks from the asserted privilege “enjoyed” by their house of looking forward beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. “For my own sake, noble kinswoman,” answered Eveline, “I would decline such foreknowledge, even were it possible to acquire it without transgressing the rules of the Church. Could I have foreseen what has befallen me within these last unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that time.” So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of Sir Walter’s shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who have been consulting his magic mirror. “Few,” he added, in a melancholy tone, “leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you to judge of the condition of those who have the power of gratifying such irregular curiosity.” Cowper observes in one of his letters that man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own, he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence; and wish perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims,
“Visions of glory, spare my aching sight,
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!”
When Harold and Haco, “pale king and dark youth,” in Lord Lytton’s historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and “climb to heaven through the mysteries of hell,” the witch bids them—poor “worms”—crawl back to the clay—to the earth: “One such night as the hag ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and sear the life in your eyeballs,” etc., etc. What says the wizard, again, in Tasso?