the one was blamable and the other praiseworthy. Are not
all things subjected to the law of necessity? Assuredly; time and chance
govern all things: yet how can this be? alas!

Then there was myself; for what was I born? Are not all things born to
be forgotten? That's incomprehensible: yet is it not so? Those
butterflies fall and are forgotten. In what is man better than a
butterfly? All then is born to be forgotten. Ah! that was a pang
indeed; 'tis at such a moment that a man wishes to die. The wise king of
Jerusalem, who sat in his shady arbours beside his sunny fish-pools,
saying so many fine things, wished to die, when he saw that not only all
was vanity, but that he himself was vanity. Will a time come when all
will be forgotten that now is beneath the sun? If so, of what profit is
life?

In truth it was a sore vexation of spirit to me when I saw, as the wise
man saw of old, that whatever I could hope to perform must necessarily be
of very temporary duration; and if so, why do it? I said to myself,
whatever name I can acquire, will it endure for eternity? scarcely so. A
thousand years? Let me see! what have I done already? I have learnt
Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand
lines, into English rhyme; I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered
the old book of ballads cast by the tempest upon the beach into
corresponding English metre. Good! have I done enough already to secure
myself a reputation of a thousand years? No, no! certainly not; I have
not the slightest ground for hoping that my translations from the Welsh
and Danish will be read at the end of a thousand years. Well, but I am
only eighteen, and I have not stated all that I have done; I have learnt
many other tongues, and have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and
Arabic. Should I go on in this way till I am forty, I must then be very
learned; and perhaps, among other things, may have translated the Talmud,
and some of the great works of the Arabians. Pooh! all this is mere
learning and translation, and such will never secure immortality.
Translation is at best an echo, and it must be a wonderful echo to be
heard after the lapse of a thousand years. No! all I have already done,
and all I may yet do in the same way, I may reckon as nothing--mere
pastime; something else must be done. I must either write some grand
original work, or conquer an empire; the one just as easy as the other.
But am I com