Liveliest and loftiest.  She my secret wish
Divin’d; and with such gladness, that God’s love
Seem’d from her visage shining, thus began: 
“Here is the goal, whence motion on his race
Starts; motionless the centre, and the rest
All mov’d around.  Except the soul divine,
Place in this heav’n is none, the soul divine,
Wherein the love, which ruleth o’er its orb,
Is kindled, and the virtue that it sheds;
One circle, light and love, enclasping it,
As this doth clasp the others; and to Him,
Who draws the bound, its limit only known. 
Measur’d itself by none, it doth divide
Motion to all, counted unto them forth,
As by the fifth or half ye count forth ten. 
The vase, wherein time’s roots are plung’d, thou seest,
Look elsewhere for the leaves.  O mortal lust! 
That canst not lift thy head above the waves
Which whelm and sink thee down!  The will in man
Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise
Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain,
Made mere abortion:  faith and innocence
Are met with but in babes, each taking leave
Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled; he, that fasts,
While yet a stammerer, with his tongue let loose
Gluts every food alike in every moon. 
One yet a babbler, loves and listens to
His mother; but no sooner hath free use
Of speech, than he doth wish her in her grave. 
So suddenly doth the fair child of him,
Whose welcome is the morn and eve his parting,
To negro blackness change her virgin white. 
     “Thou, to abate thy wonder, note that none
Bears rule in earth, and its frail family
Are therefore wand’rers.  Yet before the date,
When through the hundredth in his reck’ning drops
Pale January must be shor’d aside
From winter’s calendar, these heav’nly spheres
Shall roar so loud, that fortune shall be fain
To turn the poop, where she hath now the prow;
So that the fleet run onward; and true fruit,
Expected long, shall crown at last the bloom!”

CANTO XXVIII

So she who doth imparadise my soul,
Had drawn the veil from off our pleasant life,
And bar’d the truth of poor mortality;
When lo! as one who, in a mirror, spies
The shining of a flambeau at his back,
Lit sudden ore he deem of its approach,
And turneth to resolve him, if the glass
Have told him true, and sees the record faithful
As note is to its metre; even thus,
I well remember, did befall to me,
Looking upon the beauteous eyes, whence love
Had made the leash to take me.  As I turn’d;
And that, which, in their circles, none who spies,
Can miss of, in itself apparent, struck
On mine; a point I saw, that darted light
So sharp, no lid, unclosing, may bear up
Against its keenness.  The least star we view
From hence, had seem’d a moon, set by its side,
As star by side of star.  And so far off,