In vain the soul some consolation seeks.
That spiteful, rabid, rancorous jealousy
Makes me go stumbling along the way.
If neither magic spell nor sacred plant,
Nor virtue hid in the enchanter's stone,
Will yield me the deliverance that I ask:
Let one of you, my friends, be pitiful,
And put me out, as are put out my eyes,
That they and I together be entombed.
The other follows, who says that he became blind through having been
suddenly brought out of the darkness into a great light: accustomed to
behold ordinary beauties, a celestial beauty was suddenly presented
before his eyes--a sun-god--in this manner his sight became dull and the
twin lights which shine at the prow of the soul were put out: for the
eyes are like two beacons, which guide the ship, and this would happen
to one brought up in Cimmerian obscurity if he fixed his eyes suddenly
upon the sun. In the sistine he begs for free passage to Hades, because
darkness alone is suitable to a dark condition. He says:
65.
_The third blind man_.
If sudden on the sight, the star of day
Should shed his beams on one in darkness reared,
Nurtured beneath the black Cimmerian sky,
Far from the radiance of the glorious sun,
The double light, the beacon of the soul
He quenches: then as a foe he hides.
Thus were my eyes made dull, inept,
Used only, wonted beauties to behold.
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