of which the very essence consists in their
continuance. They are tolerable so long as they are illuminated by a ray
of hope. Seclusion and hardship might even come at first with some charm
of novelty to a philosopher who, as was not unfrequent among the amateur
thinkers of his time, occasionally practised them in the very midst of
wealth and friends. But as the hopeless years rolled on, as the efforts
of friends proved unavailing, as the loving son, and husband, and father
felt himself cut off from the society of those whom he cherished in such
tender affection, as the dreary island seemed to him ever more barbarous
and more barren, while season after season added to its horrors without
revealing a single compensation, Seneca grew more and more disconsolate
and depressed. It seemed to be his miserable destiny to rust away,
useless, unbefriended, and forgotten. Formed to fascinate society, here
there were none for him to fascinate; gifted with an eloquence which
could keep listening senates hushed, here he found neither subject nor
audience; and his life began to resemble a river which, long before it
has reached the sea, is lost in dreary marshes and choking sands.

Like the brilliant Ovid, when he was banished to the frozen wilds of
Tomi, Seneca vented his anguish in plaintive wailing and bitter verse.
In his handful of epigrams he finds nothing too severe for the place of
his exile. He cries--

"Spare thou thine exiles, lightly o'er thy dead,
Alive, yet buried, be thy dust bespread."

And addressing some malignant enemy--

"Whoe'er thou art,--thy name shall I repeat?--
Who o'er mine ashes dar'st to press thy feet,
And, uncontented with a fall so dread,
Draw'st bloodstained weapons on my darkened head,
Beware! for nature, pitying, guards the tomb,
And ghosts avenge th' invaders of their gloom,
Hear, Envy, hear the gods proclaim a truth,
Which my shrill ghost repeats to move thy ruth,
WRETCHES ARE SACRED THINGS,--thy hands refrain:
E'en sacrilegious hands from TOMBS abstain."

The one fact that seems to have haunted him most was that his abode in
Corsica was a living death.

But the most complete picture of his state of mind, and the most
melancholy memorial of his inconsistency as a philosopher, is to be
found in his "Consolation to Polybius." Polybius was one of those
freedmen of the Emperor whose bloated wealth and servile insolence were