Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/55

 well as a lamp for their counters; it has on its side, very naturally, the purblind, the clever, the cunning, the prudent, the discreet, those who can only see things close, those who scrutinize a spider's web. But there must be somebody on the side of the stars! somebody to stand up for brotherhood, for mercy, for honour, for right, for freedom, and for the solemn splendour of absolute truth. With all their sublimity and serenity, flowers as they are of summer everlasting, the shining constellations have need that the world they guide should bear them witness that they shine, and some man's voice be raised in every age to reassure his brothers by such cry of testimony uttered across the night; for nothing would be so terrible as an ultimate equality of good and evil, of light and darkness, in the sight of the supreme and infinite unknown world; nothing would bring so heavy an indictment against God as the mad and senseless waste of light unprofitably lost and scattered about the hollow deep of heaven without the direction of a will. This absence of will, this want of conscience in the world, the prophet of belief refuses to accept as possible. In the last poem of the book he rejects the conception of evil as triumphant in the end, of nature as a cheat so ghastly and so base that God ought to hide himself for shame, of a heaven which shelters from sight a divine malefactor, of some one hiding behind the starry veil of the abyss who premeditates a crime, of man as having given all, the days of his life, the tears of his eyes, the blood of his heart, only to be made the august plaything of treacherous omnipotence: it would not be worth while for the winds to stir the stormy tide of our lives, for the morning to