2. For when lawless men had supposed that they held a holy nation in their power, They, themselves, prisoners of darkness, and bound in the fetters of a long night, Close kept beneath their roofs, Lay exiled from the eternal providence.
3. For while they thought that they were unseen in their secret sins, They were sundered one from another by a dark curtain of forgetfulness, Stricken with terrible awe, and sore troubled by spectral forms.
4. For neither did the dark recesses that held them guard them from fears, But sounds rushing down rang around them, And phantoms appeared, cheerless with unsmiling faces.
5. And no force of fire prevailed to give them light, Neither were the brightest flames of the stars strong enough to illumine that gloomy night:
6. But only there appeared to them the glimmering of a fire self-kindled, full of fear; And in terror they deemed the things which they saw To be worse than that sight, on which they could not gaze.
7. And they lay helpless, made the sport of magic are, And a shameful rebuke of their vaunts of understanding:
8. For they that promised to drive away terrors and troublings from a sick soul, These were themselves sick with a ludicrous fearfulness:
9. For even if no troublous thing affrighted them, Yet, scared with the creepings of vermin and hissings of serpents,
10. they perished for very trembling, Refusing even to look on the air, which could on no side be escaped.
11. For wickedness, condemned by a witness within, is a coward thing, And, being pressed hard by conscience, always forecasts the worst lot:
12. For fear is nothing else but a surrender of the help which reason offers;