fore am I thus consigned,
With eyes that every truth must see,
Lone in the city of the blind?
Cursed with the anguish of a power
To view the fates I may not thrall;
The hovering tempest still must lower,
The horror must befall.

Boots it, the veil to lift, and give
To sight the frowning fates beneath?
For error is the life we live,
And, oh, our knowledge is but death!
Take back the clear and awful mirror,
Shut from mine eyes the blood-red glare;
Thy truth is but a gift of terror,
When mortal lips declare.

My blindness give to me once more,
The gay, dim senses that rejoice;
The past's delighted songs are o'er
For lips that speak a prophet's voice.

To me _the future_ thou has granted;
I miss the moment from the chain--
The happy present hour enchanted!
Take back thy gift again!"* [Bulwer's translation.]

These lines express more than the trite observation, that a knowledge
of futurity would prove a torment to the possessor. Beneath that
obvious is couched the deeper moral, which expresses the sufferings of
the philosophic prophet--of the man who, too much for his own quiet,
anticipates reasonings, conclusions, sentiments, forms of social life
yet to prevail--the man to whom not coming events, but coming ideas,
cast their shadows before. If we could suppose one at the time of the
crusades, educated to associate and sympathize with the choice spirits
of the age, yet anticipating the sense of their age, in making the
comparative estimate of chivalrous adventure, and successful
cultivation of the arts of peace and industry; he must have felt
somewhat like Cassandra among the less gifted. If we could look on
life, as our successors will two hundred years hence, we too might
complain of being "lone in the city of the blind;" unless large Hope
and Benevolence enabled us to live on the future. Thus we find
additional motive to desiring a united and absolute, rather than an
individual and relative progress, in the consideration that knowledge
most worthily so called--whoso increaseth greatly beyond the average
attainment, doth so to his own sorrow.

To complete the list of false estimates of good, refuted by one test,
we should allude to the frivolities of gentility and fashion-the
passion for wearing badges of distinction, however impotent or
unme