times 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'q!

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."

For

The theme of our part knowledge, so strictly cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, is one to which Thomson repeatedly recurs. instance, in an earlier book :

"But here the cloud,

So wills Eternal Providence, sits deep.
Enough for us to know that this dark state,
In wayward passions lost, and vain pursuits,
This infancy of being, cannot prove
The final issue of the works of God,

By boundless love and perfect wisdom form'd

And ever rising with the rising mind."

Again, with emphasis and discretion (as Polonius says), he puts the query

"Shall little haughty ignorance pronounce

His works unwise, of which the smallest part
Exceeds the narrow vision of her mind?
As if upon a full proportioned dome,
On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art,
A critic-fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads
An inch around, with blind presumption bold,
Should dare to tax the structure of the whole.

وو

Horace Walpole makes use of a similar figure in one of his three or four thousand published letters: "We are poor silly animals: we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue

about the nature of the seasons, and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one annual revolution of them."

"Earth's number-scale is near us set;

The total God alone can see;

But each some fraction." *

Addison, in one of his essays, comments on the body of an animal as an object comparatively adequate to our senses, it being a particular part of Providence that lies within a narrow compass, so that the eye is able to command it, and by successive inquiries to search into all its parts. Could the body of the whole earth, he goes on to say, or indeed the whole universe, be thus subjected to the examination of our senses, were it not too big and disproportioned for our inquiries, too unwieldy for the management of the eye and hand, "there is no question but it would appear to us as curious and well-contrived a frame as that of a human body. We should see the same concatenation and subserviency, the same necessity and usefulness, the same beauty and harmony, in all and every of its parts, as what we discover in the body of every single animal." To adopt an illustration of Fénélon's to the same purpose: imagine the letters of a sentence to be so enormous in size, that a man could only make out one of them at a time; in that case he could not read, that is, collect the letters together and discover the sense of them in combination. So it is, argues the benign prelate, with the grands traits of Providence in the conduct of the world at large during the lapse of centuries. It is only the whole that is intelligible, and the whole is too vast to be scrutinised near at hand. Each event in the process of ages is like a separate letter or sign, which is too large for our petty organs, and which is without a meaning when taken apart from the rest. A more vigorous philosopher than the gentle Fénélon compares the universe to a picture, the beauty of which is then alone perceptible when the true stand-point of perspective is taken. There are certain inventions in perspective, or certain

beautiful designs, he says, which look all confusion until you either inspect them from the right point of view, or make use of some kind of glass or mirror as the medium of observation. In the same manner the apparent deformities of our fractional side-views, resolve themselves into harmonious unity when the eye is directed aright.

Dr. Johnson was in an unwontedly placid and benignant frame of mind, by Boswell's account, when the two stood together, one serene autumn night, in Dr. Taylor's garden, and the sage delivered himself, in meditative mood, of this noteworthy surmise: "Sir," said he, "I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually." Be that as it may, few could have been found more ready than the melancholic Johnson to agree that meanwhile, until the day star arise and the shadows flee away,

"The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate,
Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors :
Our understanding traces them in vain,
Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;
Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
Nor where the regular confusion ends."

It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble: "Be it enough for us to know, that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned." He would have his correspondent bear in mind that the epithet “very good" is a necessary adjunct to very great; " and that is sufficient. The inference is self-evident, that under the sway of the Being who combines in himself those two qualities—the très-bon and the très-grand-all the evils we either suffer or witness must needs be acts of justice or means of reformation equally indispensable. In the declared love of God to man, M. de Maistre found a general solution of all the enigmas that

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can offend (scandaliser, in the New Testament sense of putting a stumbling-block in the way of) our ignorance. "Fixed to one little point of time and space, we are insane enough to refer all to this point; and in so doing we are at once blameworthy and absurd." If De Maistre's collation of the très-bon with the trèsgrand resembles the lines of Drummond's hymn beginning, "O King, whose greatness none can comprehend, Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend,"

so is the scope of his argument at one with what follows:

"Here, where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of Thy might,
Still owly-eyed when staring on Thy light."

What we call this life of men on earth, as Mr. Browning's island-poet has it, is, as he finds much reason to conceive,

"Intended to be viewed eventually

As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all." *

Pope's well-worked line is of perpetual application,

"'Tis but a part we see, and not the whole."

So is the avowal of the present laureate :

"I see in part

That all, as in some work of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end."

To us, as Sir Benjamin Brodie remarks, in one of his psychological discussions, the universe presents itself as an assemblage of heterogeneous phenomena, some of which we can reduce to laws of limited operation, while others stand by themselves, bearing no evident relation to anything besides. We may well, he thinks, suppose that there are in the universe beings of a superior intelligence, and possessed of a greater range of observation, who are sufficiently "behind the scenes" to be able to contemplate all the immense variety of material phenomena as the result of one great general law. Their standpoint may

* "Cleon," by Robert Browning.

enable them to see a Cosmos, a world of order, where to lower intelligences Chaos alone is discernible, a world comparatively without form and void, with darkness upon the face of its deep. And as with the physical, so with the metaphysical. the material, so with the moral.

"Experience, like a pale musician, holds

A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand

Of God's will in the worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad perplexed minors.

"We murmur-'Where is any certain tune

Of measured music, in such notes as these?'-
But angels leaning from their golden seat,

Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won

The issue of completed * cadences,

As with

And, smiling down the stars, they whisper-Sweet."+

WH

RULING THE WAVES.

PSALM CXIV. I-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.

"What

HEN Israel went out of Egypt, it was under the guidance of One whose hand being mighty to save, the sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven back. ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?" The trembling was at the presence of Him who hath placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. The commotion, the fleeing, the driving back, was at the bidding of Him

*

Completed. Finis coronat opus. Children and fools, it has been observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the sense to make out what the artist is designing. "The whole of this world that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault with Providence."-ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

+ Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Perplexed Music."