There was one question which I was continually asking myself at this period, and which has more than once met the eyes of the reader who has followed me through the last chapter:  ‘What is truth?’ I had involved myself imperceptibly in a dreary labyrinth of doubt, and, whichever way I turned, no reasonable prospect of extricating myself appeared.  The means by which I had brought myself into this situation may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma to himself; thence the cry of ‘What is truth?’ I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief—­I was, indeed, in a labyrinth!  In what did I not doubt?  With respect to crime and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that 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