“Hear, hear! That’s it, Benjy,” said the Captain, with a nod and a short laugh, while his son assumed the satisfied gravity of look appropriate to one who has made a hit; “I won’t decrease his bliss by removing his ignorance yet awhile.”
“Hain’t Buzzby got nuffin’ to say on that ’ere pint?” whispered Butterface to Benjy, who sat just in front of him.
“Ah! to be sure. I say, Alf,” said the boy with an earnest look, “hasn’t your favourite author got something to say about the bliss of ignorance? I’m almost sure I heard you muttering something in your dreams on that subject the other day.”
“Of course he has. He has a long poem on that subject. Here is a bit of it.”
Alf, whose memory was good, immediately recited the following:
“How sweet is ignorance! How soothing to the mind,
To search for treasures in the brain, and nothing find!
Consider. When the memory is richly stored,
How apt the victim of redundant knowledge to be bored!
When Nothing fills the chambers of the heart and brain,
Then negative enjoyment comes with pleasures in her train!
Descending on the clods of sense like summer rain.
“Knowledge, ’tis said, gives power, and so it often does;
Knowledge makes sorrow, too, around our pillows buzz.
In debt I am, with little cash; I know it—and am sad.
Of course, if I were ignorant of this—how glad!
A loving friend, whom once I knew in glowing health,
Has broken down, and also, somehow, lost his wealth.
How sad the knowledge makes me! Better far
In ignorance to live, than hear of things that jar,
And think of things that are not,—not of things that are.
“‘If ignorance is bliss,’ the poet saith—why ‘if?’
Why doubt a fact so clearly proven, stubborn, stiff?
The heavy griefs and burdens of the world around,
The hideous tyranny by which mankind is ground,
The earthquake, tempest, rush of war, and wail of woe,
Are all as though they were not—if I do not know!
Wrapped in my robe of ignorance, what can I miss?
Am I not saved from all—and more than all—of this?
Do I not revel in a regal realm of bliss?”
“Bravo! Buzzby,” cried the Captain, “but, I say, Alf, don’t it seem to smack rather too much of selfishness?”
“Of course it does, uncle. I do not think Buzzby always sound in principle, and, like many poets, he is sometimes confused in his logic.”
“You’re right, Benjy, the land is clear enough now,” remarked the Captain, whose interest in Buzzby was not profound, and whose feelings towards logic bordered on the contemptuous, as is often the case with half-educated men, and, strange to say, sometimes with highly-educated men, as well as with the totally ignorant—so true is it that extremes meet!
In the course of a couple of hours the sledges drew near to the island, which proved to be a large but comparatively low one, rising not more than a hundred feet in any part. It was barren and ragged, with patches of reindeer moss growing in some parts, and dwarf willows in others. Myriads of sea-birds made it their home, and these received the invaders with clamorous cries, as if they knew that white men were a dangerous novelty, and objected to the innovation.