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356 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
commerce, would, in less than a hundred years, spread its
empire from Cape Comorin to the eternal snow of the Himalayas;
would compel Mahratta and Mahommedan to forget
their mutual feuds in common subjection; would tame down
even those wild races which had resisted the most powerful of
the Moguls; and having
united under its laws a hundred
millions of subjects, would carry its victorious arms far to the
east of the Burrampooter, and far to the west of the Hydaspes,
dictate terms of peace at the gates of Ava, and seat its vassal
on the throne of Candahar."
Let us see the same principle exhibited in a passage at once
pictorial and "
argumentative. We know more certainly
every day," says Ruskin, " that whatever appears to us
harmful in the universe has some beneficent or necessary
operation; that the storm which destroys a harvest brightens
the sunbeams for harvests yet unsown, and that the volcano
which buries a city preserves a thousand from destruction.
But the evil is not for the time less fearful because we have
learned it to be necessary; and we easily understand the
timidity or the tenderness of the spirit
which would withdraw
itself from the presence of destruction, and create in its imagination
a world of which the peace should be unbroken, in
which the sky should not darken nor the sea rage,
in which the
leaf should not change nor the blossom wither. That man is
greater, however, who contemplates with an equal mind the
alternation of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less
beneath the sunny sky,
twilight narrowing on the horizon; and,
can bear also to watch the bars of
not less sensible to
the blessing of the peace of nature, can rejoice
in the magnificence
of the ordinances by which that peace is protected
and secured. But separated from both by an immeasurable
distance would be the man who delighted in convulsion and
disease for their own sake; who found his daily food in the