"For discords make the sweetest airs."
Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his _Etudes de la Nature_:
"C'est des contraires que resulte l'harmonie du monde."
And Burke, in nearly the same words, in his _Reflections on the French
Revolution_:
"You had that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in
the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers,
draws out the harmony of the universe."
Nor does the sentiment belong exclusively to the moderns. I find it in
Horace's twelfth Epistle:
"Nil parvum sapias, et adhuc sublimia cures,
. . . . . .
Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors."
{545}
Lucan, I think, has the same expression in his _Pharsalia_; and it forms
the basis of Longinus's remark on the eloquence of Demosthenes:
[Greek: "Oukoun ten men phusin ton epanaphoron kai asundeton pantei
phulattei tei sunechei metabolei? houtos autoi kai he taxis atakton,
kai empalin he ataxia poian perilambanei taxin."]
It may be said that, as Pope adopted the thought from Horace or Lucan, so a
poet of the fifteenth century (such as the supposed Rowley) might have
taken it from the same sources. But a comparison of the line in _The
Tournament_ with those in _Windsor Forest_ will show that the borrowing
embraces not only the thought, but the very words in which it is expressed.