Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Blair

A chill Calvinist wit lives inside this line: comfort arrives, but it doesn’t loiter. By comparing “its visits” to angels, Blair borrows the most consoling image available to a Christian imagination, then immediately undercuts any expectation of abundance. Angels don’t move in on you; they appear, deliver a message, and vanish. The phrase “short, and far between” turns that vanishing into a pattern, not an accident. Whatever “it” is - joy, mercy, relief, happiness, even hope - is framed as an intermittent mercy, rationed out with almost bureaucratic restraint.

The line’s power is technical as much as theological. “Visits” implies a guest relationship: the speaker is not in control, not the host who can summon warmth on demand. The simile does double duty, offering a halo while quietly admitting absence. Angels are proof that the divine can break into ordinary life; they’re also proof that ordinary life mostly continues without spectacle. Blair makes scarcity sound ordained.

Context matters. Blair’s best-known work, The Grave, sits in the early 18th-century “graveyard” tradition, where meditations on death and transience were a kind of public realism. The subtext isn’t melodrama; it’s moral weather. If consolations are rare, you’re pushed toward vigilance, humility, and preparedness. The line flatters no one with permanence. It offers a fleeting radiance, then reminds you how much of life is lived in the dim between visitations.