All the springtimes of the world

I'm currently reading The White Witch by Elizabeth Goudge, which is turning out to be very unusual fare, set in the time of Charles I, featuring the English Civil War, a band of gypsies, a white witch, a black witch, the village vicar, a country Squire and his family, with many a supernatural and superstitious element woven in. In it are some magnificent characters. I will perhaps have more to say when I am finished, but for now I wanted to share this paragraph. Many storms of varied sorts are raging around the globe, yet mercy and beauty shines on.

‘There was joy in Froniga’s heart …for through the whole of her sensitive being she was aware of blessedness. It was the same sort of awareness that came to her sometimes on a winter’s night in the middle of a storm. She would go to her window, draw back the curtains and see that the driving clouds had parted as though a hand had drawn them aside like a curtain, and in a pool of tranquil sky she would see a few stars gleaming. The storm was not over, it would rage on until it had blown itself out, but the depth of mercy beyond had shown itself. That pool of sky held all the springtimes of the world. And so it was with the storms that men in their wickedness chose to let loose upon the world. They must spend themselves. But now and then, through them and in spite of them, mercy shone, imposing some pattern on the flux of things.’ 

~ Elizabeth Goudge The White Witch

It calls to mind this quote from Samwise Gamgee near the end of The Lord of the Rings, which it seems I didn't actually share here last year when I re-read it:

'There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.'

~ JRR Tolkien The Lords of the Rings