BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 148

Put to the labor of a beast, debased

Lower than bondslave! Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; .
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.

Yet stay, let me not rashly call in doubt

Divine prediction: what if all foretold

Had been fulfill’d but through mine own default,
Whom have I to complain of but myself?

Who this high gift of strength committed to me,
In what part lodged, how easily bereft me,
Under the seal of silence could not keep,

But weakly to a woman must reveal it,
O’ercome with importunity and tears.

O impotence of mind in body strong!

But what is strength without a double share

Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burthensome,
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall

By weakest subtleties, not made to rule,

But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
God, when he gave me strength, to show withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair,
But peace, I must not quarrel with the will

Of highest dispensation, which herein

Haply had ends above my reach to know:
Suffices that to me strength is my bane

And proves the source of all my miseries,

So many, and so huge, that each apart

Would ask a life to wail; but chief of all,

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!

Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

Light, the prime work of God, to me’s extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull’d, which might in part my grief have eased
Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me;
They creep, yet see, I dark in light exposed

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong.
Within doors, or without, stillas a fool

In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half,
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,