The only truth that yet has been confest

"Within these latest thousand years or later.Perhaps the fine old fellow spoke in jest: —For my part, I am but a mere spectator,And gaze where'er the palace or the hovel is,Much in the mode of Goethe 's Mephistopheies;

VIII.

But neither love nor hate in much excess;Though 'twas not once so. If I sneer some-times,

It is because I cannot well do less,

And now and then it also suits my rhymes.I should be very willing to redress

Men’s wrongs, and rather check than punishcrimes,

Had not Cervantes, in that too true taleOf Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.