If he could so alter the past as that he should never have come into
being at all, do you not think that he would do it very gladly?
"What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this, when
he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night in which it
was said there is a man child conceived? 'For now,' he says, 'I should
have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at
rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places
for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses
with silver; or as an hidden untimely birth, I had not been; as infants
which never saw light. There the wicked cease from troubling, and the
weary are at rest.' Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries
this punishment at times to all men; but how can they ask for pity, or
complain of any mischief that may befall them, having entered open-eyed
into the snare?
"One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a
dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel
that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work,
and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly
to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it
eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding
back again into the twilight kingdom, fly--fly--if you can remember the
advice--to the haven of your present and immediate duty, taking shelter
incessantly in the work which you have in hand.
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