XII The Wax-Candle14
From bowers of gods the bees came down to man.
On Mount Hymettus,15 first, they say,
They made their home, and stored away
The treasures which the zephyrs fan.
When men had robb’d these daughters of the sky,
And left their palaces of nectar dry,—
Or, as in French the thing’s explain’d
When hives were of their honey drain’d—
The spoilers ‘gan the wax to handle,
And fashion’d from it many a candle.
Of these, one, seeing clay, made brick by fire,
Remain uninjured by the teeth of time,
Was kindled into great desire
For immortality sublime.
And so this new Empedocles16
Upon the blazing pile one sees,
Self-doom’d by purest folly
To fate so melancholy.
The candle lack’d philosophy:
All things are made diverse to be.
To wander from our destined tracks—
There cannot be a vainer wish;
But this Empedocles of wax,
That melted in the chafing-dish,
Was truly not a greater fool
Than he of whom we read at school.
[14] Abstemius. [15] Mount Hymettus.—This was the mountain whence the Greeks got fine honey. [16] Empedocles.—A Pythagorean philosopher who asserted that he had been, before becoming a man, a girl, a boy, a shrub, a bird, and a fish. He is further credited with the vanity of wishing to be thought a god, and hence of throwing himself into Mount Etna to conceal his death. Unfortunately for the success of this scheme, says one story, he convicted himself of suicide by inadvertently leaving his slippers at the foot of the volcano.