hing analogous
to the sublime tranquillity of a Zaarrah, that minds formed for the
great inquests of meditation--feeling dimly the great strife which they
did not witness, and feeling it the more deeply because for _them_ an
idealized retrospect, and a retrospect besides being potently contrasted
so deeply with the existing atmosphere, peaceful as if it had never
known a storm--are stimulated preternaturally to those obstinate
questionings which belong of necessity to a complex state of society,
turning up vast phases of human suffering under all varieties, phases
which, having issued from a chaos of agitation, carry with them too
certain a promise of sooner or later revolving into a chaos of equal
sadness, universal strife. It is the relation of the immediate isthmus
on which we stand ourselves to a past and (prophetically speaking) to a
coming world of calamity, the relation of the smiling and halcyon calm
which we have inherited to that darkness and anarchy out of which it
arose, and towards which too gloomily we augur its return--this relation
it is which enforces the other impulses, whether many or few, connecting
our own transitional stage of society with objects always of the same
interest for man, but not felt to be of the same interest. The sun, the
moon, and still more the starry heavens alien to our own peculiar
system--what a different importance in different ages have they had for
man! To man armed with science and glasses, labyrinths of anxiety and
study; to man ignorant or barbarous less interesting than glittering
points of dew. At present those 'other impulses,' which the permanent
condition of modern society, so multitudinous and feverish, adds to the
meditative impulses of our particular and casual condition as respects a
terrific revolutionary war, are _not_ few, but many, and are all in one
direction, all favouring, none thwarting, the solemn fascinations by
which with spells and witchcraft the shadowy nature of man binds him
down to look for ever into this dim abyss. The earth, whom with
sublimity so awful the poet apostrophized after Waterloo, as 'perturbed'
and restless exceedingly, whom with a harp so melodious and beseeching
he adjured to rest--and again to rest from instincts of war so deep,
haunting the very rivers with blood, and slumbering not through
three-and-twenty years of woe--is again unsealed from slumber by the
mere reaction of the mighty past working together with the too probable
f