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: