the
arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]

Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century,
his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word
had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had
figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life
by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the
optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man
(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination,
already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged
around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a
world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures
in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and
benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax
of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so,
why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and
inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask
in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are
tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and
with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a
disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature,
how frightful is the present!

Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a
little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of
this