thou hadst not cast away, had saved thee with invincible strength?

Dost thou me know? Why art thou dumb? Is it shame or wonder

makes thee silent?” But when she spied me not only still but

wordless and dumb, on my breast gently laid her hand. Said: “There

is no danger; he is entered in a lethargy, a common disease of mind

distract. He hath a little forgotten himself. Easily his memory will

return when first he hath remembered me. And, that he may, a little

let us wipe his eyes overdimmed with cloud of earthly things.” Thus

speaking, my eyes flowing with tears, folding her garment, she dried.

Meter 3

Then night o’erblown, the darkness left me,

And former strength unto my eyes returned.

As when the heav’ns astound with headlong wind,

And pole amidst the cloudy mists,

The sun is hid, and in the heav’ns appears no stars:

From high, the night on earth is spread.

The same if Boreas, sent from his Thracian den,

Doth strike and opens the hidden day.

Shines out, and with his sudden light, Phoebus, shaken,

With his beams strikes all lookers-on.

Prose 3

No otherwise, mists of my woe dissolved, to heaven I reached, and

raised my mind to know my curer’s face. Then, when on her I rolled

my eyes, and look I fixed, my nurse I saw, in whose retired rooms in

my youth I dwelt. “And how,” quoth I, “art thou come to the

solitariness of our exile, O pedagogue of all virtues? Fallen from the

highest step, shalt thou with me be tormented too with false

crimes?”

“Shall I,” quoth she, “O scholar mine, thee leave? And not to ease

thy burden, which, for my sake thou bearest, in easing thy labor with

fellowing of thy pain? It ill becomes Philosophy to leave alone an

innocent’s way. Shall I dread mine own blame, and, as if any

novelty had happed, shall I fear? Are you now to know how, among

wicked folks, Wisdom is assailed with many dangers? Have we not

wrestled with Folly’s rashness among the elder sort afore our Plato’s

age, and made therewith great battle? Yea, he alive, his master

Socrates unjustly claimed the victory of death when I was by. Whose

inheritance, when after the vulgar Epicurean and Stoic and all the

rest, each man for his part meant to bereave me, sundered (as, in part

of their prey) my garment, though I resisted and exclaimed: for, being

the workmanship of mine own hand, they, plucking some rags from it

(supposing they had all), departed from me. Among which, for that

some prints of my garment appeared, folly, supposing they were my

familiars, abused some of them with error of the vain multitude.

“Though thou hast not known Anaxagoras’s flight, nor Socrates’

venom, nor Zeno’s torment, because they are strange, yet Caniuses,

Senecas, Soranuses thou mayst know, for they are not cowards nor