Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit[1]
And Passion's host, that never brooked control:
Can all Saint, Sage, or Sophist ever writ,
People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?
VII.
Well didst thou speak, Athena's wisest son![2]
"All that we know is, nothing can be known."
Why should we shrink from what we cannot shun?
Each hath its pang, but feeble sufferers groan
With brain-born dreams of Evil all their own.
Pursue what Chance or Fate proclaimeth best;
Peace waits us on the shores of Acheron:
There no forced banquet claims the sated guest,
But Silence spreads the couch of ever welcome Rest.
VIII.[3]
Yet if, as holiest men have deemed, there be[4]
- ↑ [Compare Shakespeare, Hamlet, act v. sc. 1, passim.]
- ↑ [Socrates affirmed that true self-knowledge was to know that we know nothing, and in his own case he denied any other knowledge; but "this confession of ignorance was certainly not meant to be a sceptical denial of all knowledge." "The idea of knowledge was to him a boundless field, in the face of which he could not but be ignorant" (Socrates and the Socratic Schools, by Dr. E. Zeller, London, 1868, p. 102).]
- ↑ [Stanzas viii. and ix. are not in the MS.
The expunged lines (see var. i.) carried the Lucretian
- ↑ Frown not upon me, churlish Priest! that I
Look not for Life, where life may never be:
