like Hudibras, bursting with the wish,
“Oh, that I could enucleate
And solve the problem of my fate;
Or find, by necromantic art,
How far the destinies take my part!”
Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred, therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light too keen for mortals,
... “for those that here in dust
Must cheerful toil out their appointed years.”
In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues, it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what hearts seared or broken—“who of woman born could bear the sight and live? But ’tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes.” Looking back upon a certain year’s accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale “wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time!” And yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very endurable—small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. Margaret Hale does but exemplify in prose what Home’s Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse:
“Had some good angel oped to me the book