[1] Homer intimated, in this his answer to Thestorides, a will to have him learn the knowledge of himself, before he inquired so curiously the causes of other things. And from hence had the great peripatetic, Themistius, his most grave epiphoneme, Anima quæ seipsam ignorat, quid sciret ipsa de aliis? And, therefore, according to Aristotle, advises all philosophical students to begin with that study.
To Neptune
Hear, pow’rful Neptune, that shak’st earth in ire,
King of the great green, where dance all the quire
Of fair-hair’d Helicon; give prosperous gales;
And good pass, to these guiders of our sails,
Their voyage rend’ring happily directed,
And their return with no ill fate affected.
Grant likewise at rough Mimas’ lowest roots,
Whose strength up to her tops prærupt rocks shoots,
My passage safe arrival; and that I
My bashful disposition may apply
To pious men, and wreak myself upon
The man whose verbal circumvention
In me did wrong t’ hospitious Jove’s whole state,
And th’ hospitable table violate.
To the City of Erythræa
Worshipful Earth, Giver of all things good!
Giver of even felicity; whose flood
The mind all-over steeps in honeydew;
That to some men dost infinite kindness shew,
To others that despise thee art a shrew,
And giv’st them gamester’s galls; who, once their main
Lost with an ill chance, fare like abjects slain.
To Mariners
Ye wave-trod watermen, as ill as she
That all the earth in infelicity
Of rapine plunges; who upon your fare
As sterv’d-like-ravenous as cormorants are;
The lives ye lead, but in the worst degree,
Not to be envied more than misery;
Take shame, and fear the indignation
Of Him that thunders from the highest throne,
Hospitious Jove, who, at the back, prepares
Pains of abhorr’d effect of him that dares
The pieties break of his hospitious squares.
The Pine
Any tree else bears better fruit than thee,
That Ida’s tops sustain, where every tree
Bears up in air such perspirable heights,
And in which caves and sinuous receipts
Creep in such great abundance. For about
Thy foots, that ever all thy fruits put out,
As nourish’d by them, equal with thy fruits,
Pour Mars’s iron-mines their accurs’d pursuits.
So that when any earth-encroaching man,
Of all the martial brood Cebrenian,
Plead need of iron, they are certain still
About thy roots to satiate every will.