[Footnote A:  See passage just quoted.]

            “Life, from birth to death,
  Means—­either looking back on harm escaped,
  Or looking forward to that harm’s return
  With tenfold power of harming."[B]

[Footnote B:  A Bean-Stripe.]

And it is not possible for man to contravene this evidence of faults and omissions:  for, in doing so, he would remove the facts in reaction against which his moral nature becomes active.  What proof is there, then, that the universal love is no mere dream?  None! from the side of the intellect, answers the poet.  Man, who has the will to remove the ills of life,

“Stop change, avert decay,
Fix life fast, banish death,"[C]

[Footnote C:  Reverie—­Asolando.]

has not the power to effect his will; while the Power, whose limitlessness he recognizes everywhere around him, merely maintains the world in its remorseless course, and puts forth no helping hand when good is prone and evil triumphant.  “God does nothing.”

              “’No sign,’—­groaned he,—­
  No stirring of God’s finger to denote
  He wills that right should have supremacy
  On earth, not wrong!  How helpful could we quote
  But one poor instance when He interposed
  Promptly and surely and beyond mistake
  Between oppression and its victim, closed
  Accounts with sin for once, and bade us wake
  From our long dream that justice bears no sword,
  Or else forgets whereto its sharpness serves.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  Bernard de Mandeville.]

But he tells us in his later poems, that there is no answer vouchsafed to man’s cry to the Power, that it should reveal

       “What heals all harm,
  Nay, hinders the harm at first,
  Saves earth."[B]

[Footnote B:  Reverie—­Asolando.]

And yet, so far as man can see, there were no bar to the remedy, if “God’s all-mercy” did really “mate His all-potency.”

“How easy it seems,—­to sense
Like man’s—­if somehow met
Power with its match—­immense
Love, limitless, unbeset
By hindrance on every side!"[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

But that love nowhere makes itself evident.  “Power,” we recognize,

                 “finds nought too hard,
    Fulfilling itself all ways,
  Unchecked, unchanged; while barred,
    Baffled, what good began
  Ends evil on every side."[A]

[Footnote A:  Reverie—­Asolando.]

Thus, the conclusion to which knowledge inevitably leads us is that mere power rules.

  “No more than the passive clay
    Disputes the potter’s act,
  Could the whelmed mind disobey
    Knowledge, the cataract."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

But if the intellect is thus overwhelmed, so as to be almost passive to the pessimistic conclusion borne in upon it by “resistless fact,” the heart of man is made of another mould.  It revolts against the conclusion of the intellect, and climbs