What is more lovely than to celebrate
That Beauty’s virtue we can never reach?
What’s heavenlier, than our pride to lowly rate
In that great Love where nought is left to teach?
To admire, to adore, to fall at Beauty’s feet,
To lose all sense of this corporeal frame,
Who’d not choose Life’s intense, perpetual heat,
Whose walk of love were blessed by Beauty’s name?
O better shows our worship falsely placed,
Than the fixed heart of an unfruitful doubt!
Happier were he, with love of Hell disgraced,
Than he whose hope of Heaven gazed coldly out.
Love’s measured by the heart, from whence it flows,
Though all be void, yet it must rest on shows.