“How false is found, as on in life we go, Our early estimate of bliss or woe! —Some sparkling joy attracts us, that we fain Would sell a precious birthright to obtain: There all our hopes of happiness are placed, Life looks without it like a joyless waste; No good is prized, no comfort sought beside, Prayers, tears implore, and will not be denied: Heaven pitying hears th’ intemperate, rude appeal, And suits its answer to our truest weal. The self-sought idol, if at last bestow’d, Proves, what our wilfulness required—a goad. Ne’er, but as needful chastisement, is given The wish thus forced and torn and storm’d from Heaven; But if withheld, in pity, from our prayer, We rave, awhile, of torment and despair.... Meantime, Heaven bears the grievous wrong, and waits In patient pity till the storm abates ... Deigning, perhaps, to show the mourner soon, ’Twas special mercy that denied the boon.” Chateaubriand’s most sentimental of melancholy-mad heroes, overwhelmed, as he flatters himself, with imaginary sufferings, offers up a prayer for some real calamity to overtake him; and, to his cost, is taken at his word. “Dans mon délire, j’avais été jusqu’à désirer d’éprouver un malheur, pour avoir du moins un objet réel de souffrance: épouvantable souhait, que Dieu dans sa colère, a trop exaucé!” It is but the Christian (yet not too Christian) expression of the old pagan poet’s gloomy verse: _magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis_. There is a sonnet of Filicaja’s, of which a good deal is made by Richardson in his History of Sir Charles Grandison,—the concluding lines being an impressive vindication of the ways of Providence to man: _Provvidenza alta infinita_, if it sometimes denies the favours we implore, denies in kindness; and seeming to deny a blessing, grants one in that very refusal: _o negar finge, e nel negar concede_. William Collins the painter—a loving and lovable man as well as refined artist—in one of his letters home expresses his “decided opinion, that if the Almighty were to give us everything for which we feel desirous, we should as often find it necessary to pray to Him to take away as to grant new favours.” And he refers to thousands of cases that he could bring forward in proof of his assertion.