The cruel viper ne’er will quit my foot; Her dire envenomed teeth have there ta’en root. For pain will not troll off as pleasure doth, nor imitate it in its pleasing and tickling touches. But as the clover twists its perplexed and winding roots into the earth, and through its coarseness abides there a long time; so pain disperses and entangles its hooks and roots in the body, and continues there, not for a day or a night, but for several seasons of years, if not for some revolutions of Olympiads, nor scarce ever departs unless struck out by other pains, as by stronger nails. For who ever drank so long as those that are in a fever are adry? Or who was ever so long eating as those that are besieged suffer hunger? Or where are there any that are so long solaced with the conversation of friends as tyrants are racking and tormenting? Now all this is owing to the baseness of the body and its natural incapacity for a pleasurable life; for it bears pains better than it doth pleasures, and with respect to those is firm and hardy, but with respect to these is feeble and soon palled. To which add, that if we are minded to discourse on a life of pleasure, these men won’t give us leave to go on, but will presently confess themselves that the pleasures of the body are but short, or rather indeed but of a moment’s continuance; if they do not design to banter us or else speak out of vanity, when Metrodorus tells us, We many times spit at the pleasures of the body, and Epicurus saith, A wise man, when he is sick, many times laughs at the very extremity of his distemper. With what consistence then can those that account the pains of the body so light and easy think so highly of its pleasures? For should we allow them not to come behind its pains either in duration or magnitude, they would not yet have their being without them. For Epicurus hath made the removal of all that pains the common definition of all pleasure; as if Nature had intended to advance the pleasurable part only to the destruction of the painful, but would not have it improved any further in magnitude, and as if she only diverted herself with certain useless diversifications after she hath once arrived to an abolition of pain. But now the passage to this, conjoined with an appetence which is the measure of pleasure, is extremely short and soon over. And therefore the sense of their narrow entertainment here hath obliged them to transplant their last end from the body, as from a poor and lean soil, to the mind, in hopes of enjoying there, as it were, large pastures and fair meadows of delights and satisfactions. For Ithaca is no fit place For mettled steeds to run a race.[140] Neither can the joys of our poor bodies be smooth and equal; but on the contrary they must be coarse and harsh, and immixed with much that is displeasing and inflamed.