That somehow good Will be the final goal of ill.
Other nobly optimistic lines slide into the memory, sunlight passes over the desolate landscape, and the discomforting words, almost as they are uttered, are atoned for by the comforting personality of the poet who penned them. Thus nature, passing through the lips of man, is tempered and dulcified in the passage.
But supposing that such lines as the ones quoted, because their source is unknown to the hearer, can have no such comfort annexed to them, or supposing that the poet does not trust, but is a gloomy pessimist, or, which is more to the point, that instead of lines, with their music and generalisation, we have an actual horrid description, merely, of an actual horrid thing, all in the plainest prose, from some one whose personality we neither know, nor is worth the knowing--I have supplied an example--what softening influence is there here? Is not this but one degree better, in the sense I mean, than seeing the horror itself? I believe that here, too, the difference is of kind, and that a consolation is extracted which we cannot extract when brought face to face with nature herself, because the truth, then, is too overwhelming. The comfort, in such cases, comes not through the mind of the individual who is telling us, but through the general mind of which his is but a part, through the human ocean, rather than the human drop in it. For their own comfort, as I believe--in self-defence, to exclude misery--the great mass of mankind are optimistic, nor can any unit of the mass impart, or suggest, to us, ideas which are in opposition to this view, without suggesting, by association, the more popular and disseminated one, which we instantly lay hold of for our relief. If A can see no bright side to the thing he has witnessed, and can extract no comforting reflections out of it, yet B, C, D, etc., who have not witnessed it, can, and to the general alphabet, as against some exceptional letters of it, we immediately turn, and, enrolling ourselves amongst "_les gros bataillons_," feel that we are "in tune with the infinite," and of course that the infinite is in tune. But when, alone and amidst gloomy and stern scenery, we see a disagreeable little piece of this infinite, suggesting the whole, in actual manufacture before us, it is wonderful how little of music we find, either in it or ourselves. All seems "jangled, out of tune and harsh"; but for the "sweet bells," where are they? and were they ever there? We hear them not, even as a something behind, an undersong of hope. No, for there are no faces about us now, no comfortable looks and smiles, no good dinner or snug little circle round the fireside; no volumes of the poets either, and not a line of them, not one "smooth comfort false," comes to assist us. Man and his distortions are gone, and we have only nature--hard, stern, cold, uncompromising, truth-telling nature--before us. We look one way, and there are the huge cliffs and the iron rocks: another, and there is the great, wide, desolate sea: upwards, and there is the cold, grey sky--stern and cheerless as either. Nothing else but the birds in their thousands; and there, on the insensate waves or rocks, amidst spectators as indifferent as they, one of them is slowly, methodically, almost fastidiously, hacking, hewing, and picking another to death. You see the struggles, the flights of escape, the horrid, remorseless re-catchings; you see it proceeding and proceeding, see the wound growing larger and larger, the blood running redder and redder, and reason, with an impetuous inrush, says to you, suddenly, and as though for the first time, "This is nature--_this_ is your God of Love--_His_ scheme, _His_ plan!"