ery cases where the course of things in this
world fails to recognize its claims.

For so in fact it seems pretty clear that the forces of Nature have
little sense or discernment of right and wrong: the sunshine and the
rain are rather blindly given to favouring the good and the evil
indiscriminately; the plague and the thunderbolt are strangely
indifferent to moral distinctions where they strike. What of that?
these things are but the under-agents of Providence in the government
of the world: whereas the inward conscience of truth and right is the
immediate smile of God himself; and that is the Paradise of the truly
good man's soul, the very life of his life; he can live without
happiness, but he cannot live without that. Shakespeare's delineations
reflect, none so well, none so well as his, this great, this most
refreshing article of truth; and I heartily thank him for it; yes,
heartily!

So then, what though the divine Cordelia and the noble Kent die, and
this too in the very sweetness and fragrance of their beauty? Is it
not, do we not feel that it is, better to die with them than to live
with those who have caused their death? Their goodness was not acted
for the sake of life, but purely for its own sake: virtue such as
theirs does not make suit to Fortune's favours, nor build her trust in
them; pays not her vows to time, nor is time's thrall; no! her
thoughts are higher-reared; she were not herself, could she not "look
on tempests, and be never shaken." And such characters as these,
befall them what may, have their "exceeding great reward" in the very
virtue that draws suffering and death upon them: they need nothing
more, and it is their glory and immortality not to ask any thing more.
And shall we pity them, or shall we blame the Poet, that their virtue
is not crowned with Fortune's smiles? Nay, rather let us both pity and
blame ourselves for being of so mean and miserable a spirit.

As for those poets, and those critics of poetry, who insist that in
the Drama, which ought to be a just image of life as it is, there
shall always be an exact fitting of rewards and punishments to moral
desert; or that the innocent and the guilty, the just and the unjust,
shall be perfectly discriminated in what befalls them; as for such
poets and critics, I simply do not believe in them at all: their
workmanship is radically both unchristian and immoral; and its moral
effect, if it have any, can hardly be other than to "pamper t