The Consolation of Philosophy | Page 5

my gaze fastened on the earth, continued silently to await what she might do next. Then she drew near me and sat on the edge of my couch, and, looking into my face all heavy with grief and fixed in sadness on the ground, she bewailed in these words the disorder of my mind:
FOOTNOTES:
[A] [Greek: P] (P) stands for the Political life, the life of action; [Greek: Th] (Th) for the Theoretical life, the life of thought.
[B] The Stoic, Epicurean, and other philosophical sects, which Boethius regards as heterodox. See also below, ch. iii., p. 14.
SONG II.
HIS DESPONDENCY.
Alas! in what abyss his mind?Is plunged, how wildly tossed!?Still, still towards the outer night?She sinks, her true light lost,?As oft as, lashed tumultuously?By earth-born blasts, care's waves rise high.
Yet once he ranged the open heavens,?The sun's bright pathway tracked;?Watched how the cold moon waxed and waned;?Nor rested, till there lacked?To his wide ken no star that steers?Amid the maze of circling spheres.
The causes why the blusterous winds?Vex ocean's tranquil face,?Whose hand doth turn the stable globe,?Or why his even race?From out the ruddy east the sun?Unto the western waves doth run:
What is it tempers cunningly?The placid hours of spring,?So that it blossoms with the rose?For earth's engarlanding:?Who loads the year's maturer prime?With clustered grapes in autumn time:
All this he knew--thus ever strove?Deep Nature's lore to guess.?Now, reft of reason's light, he lies,?And bonds his neck oppress;?While by the heavy load constrained,?His eyes to this dull earth are chained.
II.
'But the time,' said she, 'calls rather for healing than for lamentation.' Then, with her eyes bent full upon me, 'Art thou that man,' she cries, 'who, erstwhile fed with the milk and reared upon the nourishment which is mine to give, had grown up to the full vigour of a manly spirit? And yet I had bestowed such armour on thee as would have proved an invincible defence, hadst thou not first cast it away. Dost thou know me? Why art thou silent? Is it shame or amazement that hath struck thee dumb? Would it were shame; but, as I see, a stupor hath seized upon thee.' Then, when she saw me not only answering nothing, but mute and utterly incapable of speech, she gently touched my breast with her hand, and said: 'There is no danger; these are the symptoms of lethargy, the usual sickness of deluded minds. For awhile he has forgotten himself; he will easily recover his memory, if only he first recognises me. And that he may do so, let me now wipe his eyes that are clouded with a mist of mortal things.' Thereat, with a fold of her robe, she dried my eyes all swimming with tears.
SONG III.
THE MISTS DISPELLED.
Then the gloom of night was scattered,?Sight returned unto mine eyes.?So, when haply rainy Caurus?Rolls the storm-clouds through the skies,?Hidden is the sun; all heaven?Is obscured in starless night.?But if, in wild onset sweeping,?Boreas frees day's prisoned light,?All suddenly the radiant god outstreams,?And strikes our dazzled eyesight with his beams.
III.
Even so the clouds of my melancholy were broken up. I saw the clear sky, and regained the power to recognise the face of my physician. Accordingly, when I had lifted my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, I beheld my nurse, Philosophy, whose halls I had frequented from my youth up.
'Ah! why,' I cried, 'mistress of all excellence, hast thou come down from on high, and entered the solitude of this my exile? Is it that thou, too, even as I, mayst be persecuted with false accusations?'
'Could I desert thee, child,' said she, 'and not lighten the burden which thou hast taken upon thee through the hatred of my name, by sharing this trouble? Even forgetting that it were not lawful for Philosophy to leave companionless the way of the innocent, should I, thinkest thou, fear to incur reproach, or shrink from it, as though some strange new thing had befallen? Thinkest thou that now, for the first time in an evil age, Wisdom hath been assailed by peril? Did I not often in days of old, before my servant Plato lived, wage stern warfare with the rashness of folly? In his lifetime, too, Socrates, his master, won with my aid the victory of an unjust death. And when, one after the other, the Epicurean herd, the Stoic, and the rest, each of them as far as in them lay, went about to seize the heritage he left, and were dragging me off protesting and resisting, as their booty, they tore in pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands, and, clutching the torn pieces, went off, believing that the whole of me had passed into their possession. And some of them, because some traces of my vesture were seen upon them, were destroyed through