The same good Providence, as Madame de Sévigné writes, that governs all, shall one day unravel all; we poor mortals being, in the meanwhile, so many all but stone-blind and utterly ignorant lookers-on. We suffer, as the author of “Thorndale” says—there is no doubt about that—and we naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony; but the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life, should be taken from some calm, impersonal point of view. “We should command the widest horizon possible. Of the great whole of humanity we see but a little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights only of the picture, sometimes 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’d! 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.” The theme of our part knowledge, so strictly cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, is one to which Thomson repeatedly recurs. For 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.” 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.”[25]