Perhaps, however, no author of the day impressed Mathilde so powerfully for a time, or rendered her such permanent service, as one then famous, but now, though unforgotten, comparatively little read—Henry Thomas Buckle. The effect he produced, as she herself implies, arose less from the power of his message than from its seasonableness. A year before it might have been too soon for efficacy; a year afterwards it might have been too late. It is indeed a momentous discovery when one learns that Law, not Chance or Caprice, regulates the universe, and great is the part performed by him who brings the message, be he himself a great man or a small. Buckle, an intermediate man, came at the right moment, and impressed upon her a lesson essential for her peace.
"What helped me? What took this soul of mine on the verge of a blank atheism, of utter denial and despair; what took it and led it out of itself to the calm and awful centre of things? It was Buckle. I verily think I owe to him what I owe to no other human being—an eternal debt of gratitude for the work he has left. I somehow feel as if the great thanks with which I thanked him must have reached him wherever and whatsoever he is in this great mysterious universe. It was the right book at the right time, the serene proclamation of law as he unrolled the history of humanity before me from its earliest germs—not the perplexed history of facts which vexes the soul with the confused din and uproar of purposeless flux and reflux—but the eternal underlying history which holds on its calm and even course, a history whose serenity and solemnity are like the light of stars! For wherever we do not understand there is darkness, sorrow, wrong; but wherever we do understand there is light, triumph, and unity. I did not read easily, it was a hard battle. I would begin with the same chapter day
