A good that never satisfies the mind, A beauty fading like the April flowers, A sweet with floods of gall that runs combined, A pleasure passing ere in thought made ours, An honour that more fickle is than wind, A glory at opinion’s frown that lowers, A treasury which bankrupt time devours, A knowledge than grave ignorance more blind; A vain delight our equals to command, A style of greatness, in effect a dream, A swelling thought of holding sea and land, A servile lot, decked with a pompous name; Are the strange ends we toil for here below, Till wisest death makes us our _errors_ know. _Drummond._ Swifter than feathered arrow in the wind, Than winged vessel on the yielding tide, Than river shooting down the mountain side, Than foot o’er champaign of the slender hind, To _error’s_ flowery vale, the headlong mind Is prone, without a curb, to fly aside; Neither by dangers of the path untried, Nor roughest road, nor highest Alp confined. But if the way of truth upon the right It follows, like slow worm, or bird unfledged, At every twig it checks, and stone, and rill. Great guide! make strong my pinions for the flight In that true course; by every other hedged, And lift and bring me to thy holy hill! _From the Italian of Tarsia._ “But what is _error_?--Answer he who can!” The Sceptic somewhat haughtily exclaimed: “Love, Hope, and Admiration--are they not Mad Fancy’s favourite vassals? Does not life Use them, full oft, as pioneers to ruin, Guides to destruction? Is it well to trust Imagination’s light when Reason’s fails, The unguarded taper where the guarded faints? --Stoop from those heights, and soberly declare What _error_ is; and of our _errors_, which Doth most debase the mind; the genuine seats Of power, where are they? Who shall regulate, With truth, the scale of intellectual rank?” _Wordsworth._ Thus _error’s_ monstrous shapes from earth are driven; They fade, they fly--but truth survives their flight; Earth has no shades to quench that beam of heaven; Each ray that shone, in early time, to light The faltering footsteps in the path of right, Each gleam of clearer, brightness, shed to aid In man’s maturer day his bolder sight, All blended, like the rainbow’s radiant braid, Pour yet, and still shall pour, the blaze that cannot fade. _W. C. Bryant._