Chapter 7 No.7

Love, through whom high truth I do discern,

Thou openest the black diamond doors;

Through the eyes enters my deity, and through seeing

Is born, lives, is nourished, and has eternal reign;

Shows forth what heaven holds, earth and hell:

Makes present true images of the absent;

Gains strength: and drawing with straight aim,

Wounds, lays bare and frets the inmost heart.

Attend now, thou base hind unto the truth,

Bend down the ear to my unerring word;

Open, open, if thou canst the eyes, foolish perverted one!

Thou understanding little, call'st him child,

Because thou swiftly changest, fugitive he seems,

Thyself not seeing, call'st him blind.

Love shows Paradise in order that the highest things may be heard, understood, and accomplished; or it makes the things loved, grand-at least in appearance. He says, Fate takes love away; because, often in spite of the lover, it does not concede, and that which he sees and desires is distant and adverse to him. Every good he sets before me, he says of the object, because that which is indicated by the finger of Love seems to him the only thing, the principal, and the whole. "Steals it from me," he says of Jealousy, not simply in order that it may not be present to me; removing it from my eyesight, but in order that good may not be good, but an acute evil; sweet, not sweet, but an agonized longing; while the heart-that is, the will, has joy by the great force of love, whatever may be the result; the mind-that is, the intellectual part, has pain through the Fear of Fate, which fate does not favour the lover; the spirit-that is, the natural affections, are cold because they are snatched from the object which gives joy to the heart, and which might give pleasure to the mind; the soul-that is, the suffering and sensitive soul, is heavy-that is, finds itself oppressed with the heavy burden of jealousy which torments it. To this consideration of his state he adds a tearful lament, and says: "Who will deliver me from war, and give me peace? or who will separate that which pains and injures me from that which I so love, and which opens to me the gates of heaven, so that the fervid flames in my heart may be acceptable, and fortunate the fountains of my tears?" Continuing this proposition, he adds:

            
            

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