"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.
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