would have thought it possible that a trading company, separated from
India by fifteen thousand miles of sea, and possessing in India only a
few acres for purposes of commerce, would in less than a hundred years
spread its empire from Cape Comorin to the eternal snows of the
Himalayas--would compel Mahratta and Mahomedan 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 established a
government far stronger than any ever known in those countries, 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 vassals 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 a
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 can easily understand the timidity or the
tenderness of the spirit which could 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
alternations of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less beneath
the sunny sky, can also bear to watch the bars of twilight narrowing on
the horizon; and, 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 disorder of
nature mingled with the suffering of humanity; and watched joyfully at
the right hand of the Angel whose appointed work is to destroy as well
as to accuse, while the corners of the house of feasting were struck by
the wind from the wilderness."

I will now cite a passage from Burke, which will seem tame after the
pictorial animatio