Within
this setting is contained one of the most magnificent pictures that Nature
ever drew, and he bethought him of the human actions, passions, and
interests of which it might have been the scene. By a connexion that was
natural enough to the situation, he imagined a fragment of life passed
between these grand limits, and the manner in which men could listen to
the never-wearied promptings of their impulses in the immediate presence
of the majesty of the Creator. He bethought him of the analogies that
exist between inanimate nature and our own wayward inequalities; of the
fearful admixture of good and evil of which we are composed; of the manner
in which the best betray their submission to the devils, and in which the
worst have gleams of that eternal principle of right, by which they have
been endowed by God; of those tempests which sometimes lie dormant in our
systems, like the slumbering lake in the calm, but which excited, equal
its fury when lashed by the winds; of the strength of prejudices; of the
worthlessness and changeable character of the most cherished of our
opinions, and of that strange, incomprehensible, and yet winning _melange_
of contradictions, of fallacies, of truths, and of wrongs, which make up
the sum of our existence.
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