Our right of thought—our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the Faculty divine
Is chained and tortured—cabined, cribbed, confined,
And bred in darkness,[1] lest the Truth should shine
Too brightly on the unpreparéd mind,
The beam pours in—for Time and Skill will couch the blind.
CXXVIII.
Arches on arches![2] as it were that Rome,
- ↑ [Compare Macbeth, act iii. sc. 4, lines 24, 25—
"But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears."] - ↑ [Compare The Deformed Transformed, act i. sc. 2, lines 49, 50—
"Those scarce mortal arches,
Pile above pile of everlasting wall."The first, second, and third stories of the Flavian amphitheatre or Colosseum were built upon arches. Between the arches, eighty to each story or tier, stood three-quarter columns. "Each tier is of a different order of architecture the lowest being a plain Roman Doric, or perhaps, rather, Tuscan, the next Ionic, and the third Corinthian." The fourth story, which was built by the Emperor Gordianus III., A.D. 244, to take the place of the original wooden gallery (mœnianum summum in ligneis), which was destroyed by lightning, A.D. 217, was a solid wall faced with Corinthian
a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty support each other: he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."—Vol. i. pp. xiv., xv.
[For Sir William Drummond (1770-1828), see Letters, 1898, ii. 79, note 3. Byron advised Lady Blessington to read Academical Questions (1805), and instanced the last sentence of this passage "as one of the best in our language" (Conversations, pp. 238, 239).]
