>"We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing

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>"We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful re ections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life — the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the sel shness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.”
>"Besides, it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result."