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 Of Providence, and let me read my life, My heart had broke when I beheld the sum Of ills which one by one I have endured.” Whereupon the lady’s faithful Anna remarks: “That God, whose ministers good angels are, Hath shut the book, in mercy to mankind.” Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. “I have somewhere read,” says Caleb Williams, “that Heaven in mercy hides from us the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord with this assertion.” And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds, that this once at least he should have been saved from insupportable labour and indescribable anguish, could he have foreseen what was then impending.—Sometimes the natural complaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand in John Webster’s tragedy: “Oh, most imperfect light of human reason, That mak’st us so unhappy to foresee What we can least prevent!” Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this: “Then did I see how that presentient shroud Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud. Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint. And the struck spirit utterly would faint, Hurl’d from full joy.”