And men my prophet wail deride! 
          The solemn sorrow dies in scorn;
     And lonely in the waste I hide
          The tortured heart that would forewarn. 
     And the happy, unregarded,
          Mocked by their fearful joy, I trod: 
     Oh! dark to me the lot awarded,
          Thou evil Pythian god!

     Thine oracle in vain to be,
          Oh! wherefore 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.